Quasi-cyclic LDPC codes: Construction and rank analysis of their parity-check matrices

A construction of binary and non-binary quasi-cyclic (QC)-LDPC codes based on partitions of finite fields of characteristic 2 is proposed. The construction is carried out in the Fourier transform domain. The parity-check matrices of these QC-LDPC codes are arrays of circulant permutation matrices. The ranks of these arrays are analyzed and combinatorial expressions are derived. Example codes are given and simulations show that they perform well over the AWGN channel decoded with message-passing decoding algorithms.