Algebraic Constructions of Nonbinary Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes

Abstract

In the late 1950's and early 1960's, finite fields were successfully used to construct linear block codes, especially cyclic codes, with large minimum distances for correcting random errors with algebraic decoding, such as Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocqenghem (BCH) and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. Recently it has been shown that finite fields can also be used successfully to construct binary quasi-cyclic (QC)-LDPC codes that perform very well not only over the AWGN channel but also over the binary erasure channel with iterative decoding, besides being efficiently encodable. This paper is concerned with constructions of nonbinary QC-LDPC codes based on finite fields