Construction of structured q-ary LDPC codes over small fields using sliding-window method

In this paper, we consider the construction of cyclic and quasi-cyclic structured q-ary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over a designated small field. The construction is performed with a pre-defined sliding-window, which actually executes the regular mapping from original field to the targeted field under certain parameters. Compared to the original codes, the new constructed codes can provide better flexibility in choice of code rate, code length and size of field. The constructed codes over small fields with code length from tenths to hundreds perform well with q-ary sum-product decoding algorithm (QSPA) over the additive white Gaussian noise channel and are comparable to the improved sphere-packing bound. These codes may found applications in wireless sensor networks (WSN), where the delay and energy are extremely constrained.