On the Construction of LDPC Codes Free of Small Trapping Sets by Controlling Cycles

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes exhibit excellent error correcting capability. However, small trapping sets in the Tanner graph are harmful to the iterative decoding algorithm. In this letter, we present a method of constructing (3, n) girth-eight quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with low error floor by removing the small trapping sets from the Tanner graph. To address this issue, we analyze the relationship between eight-cycles and small trapping sets of Tanner graphs based on fully connected base graphs without parallel edges. We find that if some eight-cycles are not found in the Tanner graphs, any elementary trapping set in the range of a ≤ 8 and b ≤ 3 is removed naturally. We also derive a lower bound on the permutation size for the construction of such codes. The experimental simulation shows a favorable error rate performance with lower error floor over additive white Gaussian noise channels.