New research on unequal error protection (UEP) property of irregular LDPC codes

Abstract

A new scheme is proposed about how to make use of the unequal error protection (UEP) property of irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. By means of the construction of a weight-increasing parity-check matrix and systematic encoding, the mapping between the important information data and the elite bits of an irregular LDPC code becomes traceable and tractable. Thus, the inherent UEP property of irregular LDPC codes is not the theoretical interest any more. The proposed scheme makes it practical to implement UEP in system applications. Taking an irregular LDPC code with code length 10000 and code rate one half as an example, simulation results are presented over AWGN channels. The validity of the proposed scheme is verified by simulation.