Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are a class of linear block LDPC

codes. The name comes from the characteristic of their parity-check

matrix which contains only a few 1’s in comparison to the amount of

0’s. Their main advantage is that they provide a performance which

is very close to the capacity for a lot of different channels and linear

time complex algorithms for decoding. Furthermore are they suited

for implementations that make heavy use of parallelism.

They were first introduced by Gallager in his PhD thesis in 1960. Gallager,

But due to the computational effort in implementing coder and en- 1960

coder for such codes and the introduction of Reed-Solomon codes,

they were mostly ignored until about ten years ago