Use of Parity Checks Inherent in LDPC Codes for Dominant Error Events Detection and k-Constraint Enforcement

In this paper, we propose to leverage the simple and explicit parity checks inherent in low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to realize dominant error events detection without code rate penalty. This is enabled by enforcing a very weak constraint on LDPC code parity check matrix structure. Such a constraint can be readily satisfied by most structured LDPC codes ever studied in the open literature such as quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes. Moreover, this zero-redundancy dominant error events detection can be further extended to handle the deliberate bit errors when deliberate bit-flipping is used to enforce kconstraints. The effectiveness of the proposed methods has been demonstrated through computer simulations.