On construction of rate-compatible low-density parity-check codes

This paper deals with the problem of devising an efficient framework for constructing rate-compatible low-density parity-check (RC-LDPC) codes. We present a deterministic framework for constructing a family of linear-time encodable RC-LDPC codes from a mother code using puncturing and extending. Application of the proposed construction to a type-II hybrid ARQ scheme with information block length k=1024 and code rates 8/19 to 8/10, using an optimized irregular mother code of rate 8/13, results in a throughput which is only about 0.7dB away from Shannon limit. This outperforms existing similar schemes based on turbo codes and LDPC codes by up to 0.5dB.