Construction of nonbinary cyclic, quasi-cyclic and regular LDPC codes: a finite geometry approach

This paper presents five methods for constructing nonbinary LDPC codes based on finite geometries. These methods result in five classes of nonbinary LDPC codes, one class of cyclic LDPC codes, three classes of quasi-cyclic LDPC codes and one class of structured regular LDPC codes. Experimental results show that constructed codes in these classes decoded with iterative decoding based on belief propagation perform very well over the AWGN channel and they achieve significant coding gains over Reed-Solomon codes of the same lengths and rates with either algebraic hard-decision decoding or Kotter-Vardy algebraic soft-decision decoding at the expense of a larger decoding computational complexity.