On a Construction Method of Irregular LDPC Codes Without Small Stopping Sets

In this paper, we present a construction method based on the progressive edge-growth (PEG) algorithm to design irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes without small stopping sets. We show how to choose the connections in the PEG algorithm when having multiple choices to connect a variable node with a check node. Since preventing small stopping sets also prevents a low minimum distance, our construction method also leads to LDPC codes with a higher minimum distance. Furthermore, we show by simulation that our construction method improves the performance over the binary erasure channel and over the additive white Gaussian noise channel for a low erasure probability and a high signal-to-noise ratio, respectively.