In this paper, we study the average symbol and bit-weight distributions for ensembles of non-binary low-density parity-check codes defined on GF(2p). Moreover, we derive the asymptotic exponential growth rate of the weight distributions in the limit of large codelength. Interestingly, we show that the normalized typical minimum distance does not monotonically increase with the size of the field.

The multi-edge type LDPC codes, introduced by Richardson and Urbanke, present the general class of structured LDPC codes. In this paper, we derive the average weight distributions of the multi-edge type LDPC code ensembles. Furthermore, we investigate the asymptotic exponential growth rate of the average weight distributions and investigate the connection to the stability condition of the density evolution.