On the weight and stopping set size distributions of LDPC codes and their generalizations

This paper overviews and connects together recent results by the authors regarding the weight and stopping set size distributions of generalizations of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We begin by reviewing a result which allows for evaluation of the growth rate of the weight distribution for codewords of any weight (linear in the codeword length). We then show how asymptotic analysis of this general result can lead to a result which encapsulates the behaviour of the growth rate of the weight distribution for the case of small linear-weight codewords. We then show that many existing results in the literature along this line may be viewed as special cases of this general result.