An efficient design of irregular LDPC codes using beta approximation for the Gilbert-Elliott channel

In this paper, we investigate the design of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for the Gilbert-Elliott (GE) channel. Recently, Eckford et al. proposed a design method of irregular LDPC codes using approximate density-evolution (DE) for Markov channels. In the design method proposed by Eckford et al., the probability density function (PDF) of the messages from variable nodes to check nodes is approximated by the Gaussian distribution. In this paper, we first show the method to obtain the accurate PDF of the messages from variable nodes to check nodes by utilizing two DE steps for the Gaussian distribution. We call this method the iterative density approximation (IDA). Using this method, we can design the good LDPC codes. Next, we propose an efficient design method of irregular LDPC codes by using Beta approximation to the PDF of the channel state probability for the GE channel. Consequently, we show that the complexity to calculate PDFs of the channel messages is considerably reduced though the rates of LDPC codes obtained by using the proposed approximation are almost the same as that of the IDA method.