High-rate nonbinary regular ouasi-cyclic LDPC codes for optical communications

The parity-check matrix of a nonbinary (NB) low-density parity-check (LDPC) code over Galois field (q) is constructed by assigning nonzero elements from (q) to the 1s in corresponding binary LDPC code. In this paper, we state and prove a theorem that establishes a necessary and sufficient condition that an NB matrix over (q), constructed by assigning nonzero elements from (q) to the 1s in the parity-check matrix of a binary quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC code, must satisfy in order for its null-space to define a nonbinary QC-LDPC (NB-QC-LDPC) code. We also provide a general scheme for constructing NB-QC-LDPC codes along with some other code construction schemes targeting different goals, e.g., a scheme that can be used to construct codes for which the fast-Fourier-transform-based decoding algorithm does not contain any intermediary permutation blocks between bit node processing and check node processing steps. Via Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that NB-QC-LDPC codes can achieve a net effective coding gain of 10.8 dB at an output bit error rate of 10^-12. Due to their structural properties that can be exploited during encoding/decoding and impressive error rate performance, NB-QC-LDPC codes are strong candidates for application in optical communications.