Analysis of the cycle-structure of LDPC codes based on Latin squares

In this paper, we introduce a family of structured low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on a class of idempotent, symmetric Latin and modified Latin squares. The parity-check matrices of the codes have a block structure with permutation blocks which insures that both their corresponding girth and minimum distance are at least equal to six. The storage requirement for codes from this class is reduced to only one parameter. We also propose a structured method for shortening the codes by removing columns that break a large number of cycles of length six. The storage requirements for the codes obtained using the described procedure consist in memorizing only two integers, while their performance under iterative decoding matches that of random-like codes of comparable length.