Design of Efficiently-Encodable Rate-Compatible Irregular LDPC Codes

We present a new class of irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for finite block length (up to a few thousand symbols). The proposed codes are efficiently encodable and have a simple rate-compatible puncturing structure. For block lengths on the order of n=1000 bits, the codes show good puncturing performance over a wide range of rates. The codes outperform optimized irregular LDPC codes and (extended) irregular repeat-accumulate codes for all rates 0.5~0.9, and are particularly good at high puncturing rates where good puncturing performance has been previously difficult to achieve.