Construction of Time Invariant Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes Free of Small Trapping Sets

In this paper, we propose a design technique for the construction of variable-regular time-invariant spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes with small constraint length and low error floor. The proposed technique reduces the error floor by imposing simple constraints on the short cycles in the code’s Tanner graph, which in turn, result in the elimination of the most dominant trapping sets of the code. In some cases, we also derive lower bounds on the syndrome former memory for satisfying such constraints. The designed codes are superior to the state-of-the-art in terms of error floor performance and/or decoding complexity and latency.