Punctured Binary Simplex Codes as LDPC codes

Digital data transfer can be protected by means of suitable error correcting codes. Among the families of state-of-the-art codes, LDPC (Low Density Parity-Check) codes have received a great deal of attention recently, because of their performance and flexibility of operation, in wireless and mobile radio channels, as well as in cable transmission systems. In this paper, we present a class of rate-adaptive LDPC codes, obtained as properly punctured simplex codes. These codes allow for the use of an efficient soft-decision decoding algorithm, provided that a condition called row-column constraint is satisfied. This condition is tested on small-length codes, and then extended to medium-length codes. The puncturing operations we apply do not influence the satisfaction of the row-column constraint, assuring that a wide range of code rates can be obtained. We can reach code rates remarkably higher than those obtainable by the original simplex code, and the price in terms of minimum distance turns out to be relatively small, leading to interesting trade-offs in the resulting asymptotic coding gain.