Performance study of non-binary LDPC Codes over GF(q)

Low-density parity check (LDPC) codes are known to perform well in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) but for very large block lengths. It has been proposed to define the codes over high order Galois fields to overcome this limitation. In this paper we construct new quasi-cyclic non-binary LDPC codes with moderate code lengths from Reed-Solomon codes with two message symbols proposed by Lin et al defined over large finite fields. We evaluate the performance of these codes on the AWGN channel by computer simulation and show that they outperform binary LDPC codes of the same length in binary bits.