Construction of Multiple-Rate QC-LDPC Codes Using Hierarchical Row-Splitting

In this letter, we propose an improved method called hierarchical row-splitting with edge variation for designing multiple-rate quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes, which constructs lower-rate codes from a high-rate mother code by row-splitting operations. Consequently, the obtained QC-LDPC codes with various code rates have the same block-length and can share common hardware resources to reduce the implementation complexity. Compared with the conventional row-combining-based algorithms, a wider range of code rates are supported. Moreover, each individual rate code could be separately optimized, making it easier to find a set of multiple-rate QC-LDPC codes with good performance for all different rates. Simulation results demonstrate that the obtained codes outperform the counterparts from digital video broadcasting-second generation terrestrial.