Construction of Girth-Eight QC-LDPC Codes from Greatest Common Divisor

For any column weight J and any row weight L, a novel framework is proposed such that a girth-eight (J,L) quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) code with any block length above a lower bound can be constructed via a simple inequality in terms of greatest common divisor (GCD). The main advantage is that the construction of a class of (J,L) girth-eight QC-LDPC codes is transformed into a rather simple task, searching for J integers satisfying the so-called GCD constraint for L. Combining the new method with masking matrices, a class of type-1 QC-LDPC codes is presented with girth at least eight. Simulation results show that the type-1 codes perform better than the random QC-LDPC codes and quadratic-congruence-based QC-LDPC codes for moderate block lengths and low code rates.