Design of rate-compatible structured LDPC codes for hybrid ARQ applications

In this paper, families of rate-compatible protograph-based LDPC codes that are suitable for incremental-redundancy hybrid ARQ applications are constructed. A systematic technique to construct low-rate base codes from a higher rate code is presented. The base codes are designed to be robust against erasures while having a good performance on error channels. A progressive node puncturing algorithm is devised to construct a family of higher rate codes from the base code. The performance of this puncturing algorithm is compared to other puncturing schemes. Using the techniques in this paper, one can construct a rate-compatible family of codes with rates ranging from 0.1 to 0.9 that are within 1 dB from the channel capacity and have good error floors.