GTTI 2008: sessione Trasmissione Numerica Non-binary LDPC codes with good performance on channels affected by bursty noise

Non-binary Reed-Solomon (RS) codes represent a typical way to counteract the effects of error bursts in hard-disk drives (HDD). Recently, it has been demonstrated how q-ary low-density paritycheck (LDPC) codes can outperform RS codes through a proper construction of the parity check (PC) matrix. In this work, two matrix design schemes, based on the main definitions of erasure burst proposed in literature, are presented. The performance of generated codes are evaluated on bursty noise channels, in order to highlight the main constraint that has to be taken into account for designing LDPC codes with a good burst error correction capability. The proposed schemes have been evaluated on both AWGN and magnetic recording channels in presence of erasure bursts, comparing their coding gain against those obtained by using non-binary RS codes.