Universal LDPC codes for cooperative communications

Cooperative communication is a well known technique to yield transmit diversity in the case of fading channels and to increase the spectral efficiency in the case of Gaussian channels. Error-correcting codes have to be carefully designed to achieve the promised gains. Good LDPC codes are known for fading channels and for Gaussian channels, but an LDPC code ensemble that performs well on both channels has not yet been presented in the literature. This paper merges two families of LDPC codes into a universal LDPC code ensemble for both fading channels and Gaussian channels. Furthermore, the new universal LDPC code ensemble outperforms previously proposed codes on the block fading channel, which is explained through a fading space analysis. Simulation of the word error rate performance of the new proposed family of LDPC codes shows that it performs well on both fading channels and Gaussian channels.