Lowdensity Parity-Check Codes

In this chapter, the LDPC block codes, which were invented by Robert Gallager and appeared in his thesis, are discussed. Then they are generalized to LDPC convolutional codes, which were invented by the second author and his graduate student Alberto Jimenez-Feltstrom. They are discussed in-depth together with bounds on their distances. Iterative decoding is introduced and iterative limits and thresholds are derived. The chapter is concluded by the introduction of the related braided block codes.