Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes on Cyclic Subgroups of Finite Fields

A new class of quasi-cyclic LDPC codes whose parity-check matrices are arrays of circulant permutation matrices constructed based on cyclic subgroups of finite fields is presented. This class of codes contains several known classes of algebraic quasi-cyclic LDPC codes as subclasses. Experimental results show that the codes constructed perform very well over the AWGN channel when decoded with iterative decoding based on belief propagation. This class of new QC-LDPC codes contains a subclass of codes which have large minimum distances. Combinatorial expressions for the ranks of the parity-check matrices of a subclass of codes constructed based on fields of characteristic two are given.