Small stopping sets in projective low-density parity-check codes

It is known that redundant parity-check equations can improve the performance of an LDPC code by reducing the number of harmful substructures in the parity-check matrix. However, it is a difficult problem to design a parity-check matrix in such a way that it avoids substructures that are known to be harmful to iterative decoding while keeping the number of redundant parity-check equations moderate and ensuring other desirable properties. We explicitly give redundant parity-check matrices for cyclic regular LDPC codes of length n and minimum distance $d \sim \sqrt{n}$ in which there are only n parity-check equations but no stopping sets of size d+1 or smaller except for those that correspond to the nonzero codewords of the smallest weight. We do this by showing that the well-known projective LDPC codes from the incidence matrices of projective planes PG(2, q) with q even have this property. This result may give insight into how the small number of redundant parity-check equations in the geometric LDPC codes may be contributing to the good performance reported in the literature. We also give a slightly improved upper bound on the size of a smallest generic erasure correcting set.