Construction of irregular QC-LDPC codes via masking with ACE optimization

Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes constructed by using algebraic approaches, such as finite geometry and finite field, generally have good structural properties and very low error-floors, and facilitate hardware implementation. Irregular QC-LDPC codes constructed from such QC-LDPC codes by using the masking technique, when decoded with the sum-product algorithm (SPA), have low decoding complexity, but often show early error-floors. In this paper, the relationship of cycle, girth and approximate cycle EMD (ACE) between the masking matrix and masked matrix is investigated, and the ACE algorithm is modified and used to construct the masking matrix for irregular QC-LDPC codes. Simulations demonstrate that the codes constructed by masking with ACE optimization exhibit much improved waterfall performance and lower error floors.