High-rate quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check codes derived from finite affine planes

This paper shows that several attractive classes of quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can be obtained from affine planes over finite fields. One class of these consists of duals of one-generator QC codes. Here, for codes contained in this class, the exact minimum-distance and a lower bound on the multiplicity of the minimum-weight codewords are presented. It is shown that the lower bound on the multiplicity provides a very accurate indication of the bit error performance at moderate and high signal-to-noise ratios, and thus error-floor behavior can be easily predicted. Also discussed is a class consisting of codes from circulant permutation matrices. An explicit formula for the rank of the parity-check matrix is presented for these codes. Furthermore, it is shown that each of these codes can be identified as a code constructed from a constacyclic maximum distance separable (MDS) code in a similar manner to the RS-based LDPC codes presented by Chen et al. and Djurdjevic et al. Experimental results show that a number of high rate QC-LDPC codes with excellent error performance are contained in these classes