Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check codes with girth larger than 12

A quasi--cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) code can be viewed as the protograph code with circulant permutation matrices (or circulants). In this correspondence, we find all the subgraph patterns of protographs of QC LDPC codes having inevitable cycles of length 2 i, i = 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, i.e., the cycles that always exist regardless of the shift values of circulants. It is also derived that if the girth of the protograph is 2g, g >= 2, its protograph code cannot have the inevitable cycles of length smaller than 6g. Based on these subgraph patterns, we propose new combinatorial construction methods of the protographs, whose protograph codes can have girth larger than or equal to 14 or 18. We also propose a couple of shift value assigning rules for circulants of a QC LDPC code guaranteeing the girth 14.