Design of irregular LDPC codes without markers for insertion/deletion channels

Over the past two decades, irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been hardly able to decode information corrupted by insertion and deletion (ID) errors without markers. Surprisingly, in this paper, we bring to light the existence of irregular LDPC codes that approach the theoretical limit of the channel with ID errors even without markers. These codes contain high fractions of low-degree check nodes that do not appear in irregular codes for other channels. This motivates us to investigate the contribution of low-degree check nodes to correcting ID errors. The investigation provides the following interesting result: degree-2 check nodes are critical to approaching the theoretical limit even without markers, codes with only degree-3, 4, or more check nodes provide moderate decoding performance, and codes with only degree-5 or more check nodes can hardly correct ID errors. Finally, we present simulation results that confirm the excellent decoding performance of the irregular codes without markers.