Low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded OFDM systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a very attractive technique for high-bit-rate data transmission in a multipath fading environment that causes intersymbol interference (ISI). There are many error-correcting codes applied to OFDM, convolutional codes, Reed-Solomon codes, turbo codes, and so on. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have attracted much attention particularly in the field of coding theory. LDPC codes were proposed by Gallager (1962) and the performance is very close to the Shannon limit with practical decoding complexity like turbo codes. We propose LDPC coded OFDM (LDPC-COFDM) systems to improve the bit error rate (BER) of OFDM. We show that the BER of the LDPC-COFDM is worse than that of the TCOFDM on an AWGN channel, while that of the LDPC-COFDM is better than that of the turbo-coded OFDM (TCOFDM) on a frequency-selective fading channel.