Performance Analysis of Practical QC-LDPC Codes: From DVB-S2 to ATSC 3.0

In this paper, a new analysis method is introduced to predict the gap between Shannon limit and successful decoding signal-to-noise ratio threshold (SNR loss) of practical quasi-cyclic low-density parity check (QC-LDPC) codes. The SNR loss of a QC-LDPC code is summed up from three aspects: 1) the base matrix; 2) the number of iterations for decoding; and 3) the finite codeword length. As an example, the SNR loss of DVB-S2 and ATSC 3.0 LDPC codes is analyzed with the proposed method. Results show that a large portion of the SNR loss of DVB-S2 LDPC codes is due to their base matrices, which is significantly improved in latest ATSC 3.0 standard. Furthermore, with the aid of the proposed analysis method, newly designed QC-LDPC codes with raptor-like structure are proposed. Bit-error rate simulations show that the proposed codes are only 0.4 dB away from Shannon limit under binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel and only 0.65 dB away from Shannon limit under binary-input Rayleigh fading channel, which are comparable with state-of-art design.