Construction of Multi-Rate Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes for Satellite Communications

To provide reliable transmissions with flexible rates for satellite communications, this paper presents a novel method of constructing multi-rate quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The basic idea is to generate low-rate codes from a high-rate mother code by combining shortening and extending, which ensures that the generated code family owns the same code length, in order to maintain the same frame structure. The code construction involves the design of base matrices and exponent matrices for the designed codes. A progressive row elimination and addition algorithm is proposed for designing the code base matrices from a high rate to low rates. This algorithm leads to the nested and systematic structure of the parity-check matrices, which are desirable for practical implementations of their encoders and decoders, while ensuring the optimal decoding thresholds. In addition, we construct a circulation coefficient matrix based on finite fields and select the optimal rows in this matrix to construct exponent matrices while considering of cycle structures. We demonstrate that the designed codes achieve better performance for all the code rates than the LDPC codes in DVB-S2X standards. In addition, the proposed codes do not exhibit error floors for their block error rates down to 10-5.