Construction of quasi‐cyclic low‐density parity‐check codes with low encoding complexity

Low encoding complexity is very important for quasi‐cyclic low‐density parity‐check (QC‐LDPC) codes used in wireless communication systems. In this paper, a new scheme is presented to construct QC‐LDPC codes with low encoding complexity. This scheme is called two‐stage particle swarm optimization (TS‐PSO) algorithm, in which both the threshold and girth distribution of QC‐LDPC codes are considered. The proposed scheme is composed of two stages. In the first stage, we construct a binary base matrix of QC‐LDPC code with the best threshold. The matrix is constructed by combining a binary PSO algorithm and the protograph extrinsic information transfer (PEXIT) method. In the second stage, we search an exponent matrix of the QC‐LDPC code with the best girth distribution. This exponent matrix is based on the base matrix obtained in the first stage. Consequently, the parity‐check matrix of the QC‐LDPC code with the best threshold and best girth distribution are constructed. Furthermore, bit error rate performances are compared for the QC‐LDPC codes constructed by proposed scheme, the QC‐LDPC code in 802.16e standard, and the QC‐LDPC code in Tam's study. Simulation results show that the QC‐LDPC codes proposed in this study are superior to both the 802.16e code and the Tam code on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh channels. Moreover, proposed scheme is easily implemented, and is flexible and effective for constructing QC‐LDPC codes with low encoding complexity. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.