  Parameters of LDPC codes, such as minimum distance, stopping distance,
stopping redundancy, girth of the Tanner graph, and their influence on the
frame error rate performance of the BP, ML and near-ML decoding over a BEC and
an AWGN channel are studied. Both random and structured LDPC codes are
considered. In particular, the BP decoding is applied to the code parity-check
matrices with an increasing number of redundant rows, and the convergence of
the performance to that of the ML decoding is analyzed. A comparison of the
simulated BP, ML, and near-ML performance with the improved theoretical bounds
on the error probability based on the exact weight spectrum coefficients and
the exact stopping size spectrum coefficients is presented. It is observed that
decoding performance very close to the ML decoding performance can be achieved
with a relatively small number of redundant rows for some codes, for both the
BEC and the AWGN channels.
