Weight distribution of the syndrome of linear codes and connections to combinatorial designs

The expectation and the variance of the syndrome weight distribution of linear codes after transmission of codewords through a binary symmetric channel are derived exactly in closed form as functions of the code's parity-check matrix and of the degree distributions of the associated Tanner graph. The influence of (check) regularity of the Tanner graph is studied. Special attention is payed to Tanner graphs that have no cycles of length four. We further study the equivalence of some classes of combinatorial designs and important classes of LDPC codes and apply our general results to those more specific structures. Simulations validate the analytical results and show that the actual cumulative distribution function of the syndrome weight is close to that of a normal distribution.