Reed-Solomon based globally coupled quasi-cyclic LDPC codes

This paper presents a special type of LDPC codes constructed based on the conventional parity-check matrices of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. LDPC codes of this type are referred to as globally coupled RS-LDPC codes. These codes are designed for correcting random errors, random short phased bursts of erasures and long bursts of erasures. The Tanner graph of a globally coupled RS-LDPC is composed of a number of disjoint copies of the Tanner graph of a local RS-LDPC code which are connected together by a group of overall check-nodes (CNs), called global CNs. A globally coupled RS-LDPC code can be decoded with a two-phase local/global iterative scheme which allows correction of local random errors and phased bursts of erasures in the local phase and global random errors and a single long burst of erasures in the global phase.