Construction of time-frequency codes based on protograph LDPC codes in OFDM communication systems

This paper proposes a scheme to construct time-frequency codes based on protograph low density parity check (LDPC) codes in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems. This approach synthesizes two techniques: protograph LDPC codes and OFDM. One symbol of encoded information by protograph LDPC codes corresponds to one sub-carrier, namely the length of encoded information equals to the number of sub-carriers. The design of good protograph LDPC codes with short lengths is given, and the proposed protograph LDPC codes can be of fast encoding, which can reduce the encoding complexity and simplify encoder hardware implementation. The proposed approach provides a higher coding gain in the Rayleigh fading channel. The simulation results in the Rayleigh fading channel show that the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed time-frequency codes is as good as random LDPC-OFDM codes and is better than Tanner LDPC-OFDM codes under the condition of different fading coefficients.