Protograph based low error floor LDPC coded modulation

In this paper we propose an innovative LDPC coded modulation scheme. We design binary low density parity check (LDPC) codes that are combined with high level modulations such as 8PSK and 16QAM with and without a channel interleaver. At the receiver a demapper transforms the received inphase and quadrature samples to produce reliability information that feeds the binary LDPC decoder. Using this scheme, the same encoder and decoder can support various modulations. Analysis of ensemble average weight enumerators shows that the minimum distance of the proposed LDPC codes grows linearly with block size. Our constructions are based on protograph structures that support high-speed decoder implementations. We also show that precoding can be used to lower the threshold of LDPC codes. The decoding thresholds of the proposed codes, which have linearly increasing minimum distance in block size, outperform that of regular LDPC codes. Furthermore, a family of low to high rate codes, with thresholds that adhere closely to their respective channel capacity thresholds, is presented. For maximum variable node degree 6, the iterative decoding thresholds of these codes outperform the best known unstructured irregular LDPC codes reported in the literature. Iterative decoding simulation results are provided for BPSK, QPSK, 8PSK, and 16QAM modulations over the additive white Gaussian noise channel. FPGA simulation results for the proposed LDPC codes with input block size of 4096 and QPSK modulation (throughput=1 bps/Hz) show that a frame error rate of 10^-8 and a bit error rate of 10 ^-10 can be achieved at E_b/N_o=1.50 dB