We study the design of structured Tanner codes with low error-rate floors on the AWGN channel. The design technique involves
the “doping” of standard LDPC (proto-)graphs, by which we mean Hamming or recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) code constraints
are used together with single-parity-check (SPC) constraints to construct a code’s protograph. We show that the doping of
a “good” graph with Hamming or RSC codes is a pragmatic approach that frequently results in a code with a good threshold and
very low error-rate floor. We focus on low-rate Tanner codes, in part because the design of low-rate, low-floor LDPC codes
is particularly difficult. Lastly, we perform a simple complexity analysis of our Tanner codes and examine the performance
of lower-complexity, suboptimal Hamming-node decoders.
This work was funded by NASA-JPL grant 1264726 and by the University of Bologna, Progetto Pluriennale.