Enhancement of Unequal Error Protection Properties of LDPC Codes

It has been widely recognized in the literature that irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes exhibit naturally an unequal error protection (UEP) behavior. In this paper, we propose a general method to emphasize and control the UEP properties of LDPC codes. The method is based on a hierarchical optimization of the bit node irregularity profile for each sensitivity class within the codeword by maximizing the average bit node degree while guaranteeing a minimum degree as high as possible. We show that this optimization strategy is efficient, since the codes that we optimize show better UEP capabilities than the codes optimized for the additive white Gaussian noise channel.