Analysis and elimination of short cycles in LDPC convolutional codes

Time-invariant low-density parity-check convolutional codes (TI LDPC-CCs) can be represented by a polynomial-domain parity-check matrix derived from the corresponding quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC block codes (LDPC-BCs), while time-varying (TV) LDPC-CCs can be obtained by unwrapping the parity-check matrices of LDPC-BCs. The cycle enumerators for TI and TV LDPC-CCs are compared. Based on the analysis of the graphical structures of short cycles in HT(D), we introduce a method of designing the polynomial syndrome former matrix HCRT(D) for LDPC-CCs. It eliminates short cycles and shows improved decoding performance on an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with lower bit error ratio (BER) curves.