Abstract
Quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have several appealing properties regarding decoding, storage requirements and encoding aspects. In this paper, we focus on the QC LDPC codes over GF(q) whose parity-check matrices have fixed column weight j=2. By investigating two subgraphs in the Tanner graphs of the corresponding base matrices, we derive two upper bounds on the minimum Hamming distance for this class of codes. In addition, a method is proposed to construct QC LDPC codes over GF(q), which have good Hamming distance distributions. Simulations show that our designed codes have good performance.
