Erasure Codes with a Banded Structure for Hybrid Iterative-ML Decoding

This paper presents new FEC codes for the erasure channel, LDPC-Band, that have been designed so as to optimize a hybrid iterative-Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding. Indeed, these codes feature simultaneously a sparse parity check matrix, which allows an efficient use of iterative LDPC decoding, and a generator matrix with a band structure, which allows fast ML decoding on the erasure channel. The combination of these two decoding algorithms leads to erasure codes achieving a very good trade-off between complexity and erasure correction capability.