On the Erasure-Correcting Capabilities of Low-Complexity Decoded LDPC Codes with Constituent Hamming Codes

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can be constructed using constituent block codes other than single parity-check (SPC) codes. This paper considers random LDPC codes with constituent Hamming codes and investigates their asymptotic performance over the binary erasure channel. It is shown that there exist Hamming code-based LDPC codes which, when decoded with a low-complexity iterative algorithm, are capable of correcting any erasure pattern with a number of erasures that grows linearly with the code length. The number of decoding iterations, required to correct the erasures, is a logarithmic function of the code length. The fraction of correctable erasures is computed numerically for various choices of code parameters