Design of Irregular SC-LDPC Codes With Non-Uniform Degree Distributions by Linear Programming

In this paper, we propose new design algorithms of irregular spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes with non-uniform degree distributions using linear programming (LP). In general, irregular SC-LDPC codes with non-uniform degree distributions are difficult to design with low complexity because their density evolution equations are multi-dimensional. To overcome this problem, proposed design algorithms are based on three main ideas: a local design of degree distributions, pre-computation of the input/output message relationship, and selection of a proper objective function. These ideas make it possible to design degree distributions of irregular SC-LDPC codes by solving low-complexity LP problems over the binary erasure channel (BEC). It is shown that the proposed irregular SC-LDPC codes designed by the proposed algorithms are superior to regular SC-LDPC codes in terms of both asymptotic and finite-length performances over the BEC. We also confirm that the proposed irregular SC-LDPC code achieves better performance compared with an optimized irregular block LDPC code in the same blocklength, which implies that the proposed design algorithms also provide a new way to construct capacity-approaching block LDPC codes.