On LDPC code ensembles with generalized constraints

In this paper, we analyze the tradeoff between coding rate and asymptotic performance of a class of generalized low-density parity-check (GLDPC) codes constructed by including a certain fraction of generalized constraint (GC) nodes in the graph. The rate of the GLDPC ensemble is bounded using classical results on linear block codes, namely Hamming bound and Varshamov bound. We also study the impact of the decoding method used at GC nodes. To incorporate both bounded-distance (BD) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding at GC nodes into our analysis without having to resort on multi-edge type of degree distributions (DDs), we propose the probabilistic peeling decoder (P-PD) algorithm, which models the decoding step at every GC node as an instance of a Bernoulli random variable with a success probability that depends on the GC block code and its decoding algorithm. The P-PD asymptotic performance over the BEC can be efficiently predicted using standard techniques for LDPC codes such as density evolution (DE) or the differential equation method. Furthermore, for a class of GLDPC ensembles, we demonstrate that the simulated P-PD performance accurately predicts the actual performance of the GLPDC code. We illustrate our analysis for GLDPC code ensembles using (2, 6) and (2,15) base DDs. In all cases, we show that a large fraction of GC nodes is required to reduce the original gap to capacity.