An unequal error protection scheme for non-binary LDPC using statistical QAM and prioritized mapping

Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes are among the most popular channel codes used nowadays because of their ability to achieve near channel capacity performances. However, with the ever-increasing demand for reliable transmission of data at higher data rates, there is a need to narrow down the gap between the performance of LDPC codes and the channel capacity. LDPC codes and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) have been widely deployed in wireless communication standards such as the IEEE 802.11n and Digital Video Broadcasting-Second Generation Terrestrial (DVB-T2). Recently, several Unequal Error Protection (UEP) schemes have been used to enhance the performance of LDPC codes. In this paper an UEP scheme is proposed for NonBinary LDPC codes with QAM. The scheme uses the statistical distribution of the source symbols to obtain a more efficient statistical QAM constellation. Additionally, it uses the degree distribution of the nodes of the LDPC codeword to achieve prioritized QAM mapping. Simulations revealed that the proposed scheme can provide Eb/N0 gains of up to 0.78 dB and 1.24 dB with 16-QAM and 64-QAM respectively in the range BER≤10.