In multipath environments, the error rate performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is severely degraded by the deep fading subcarriers. Powerful error-correcting codes must be used with OFDM. This paper presents a quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded OFDM system, in which the redundant bits of each codeword are mapped to a higher-order modulation constellation. The optimal degree distribution was calculated using density evolution. The corresponding quasi-cyclic LDPC code was then constructed using circulant permutation matrices. Group shuffled message passing scheduling was used in the iterative decoding. Simulation results show that the system achieves better error rate performance and faster decoding convergence than conventional approaches on both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. This paper presents a quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (OFDM) which is severely degraded by the deep fading subcarriers. Powerful error-correcting codes must be used with OFDM. LDPC) coded OFDM system, in which the redundant bits of each codeword are mapped to a higher-order modulation constellation. The optimal degree distribution was calculated using density evolution. The corresponding quasi-cyclic LDPC code was then constructed using circulant permutation matrices. Group shuffled message passing schedule was used in the iterative decoding. Simulation results show that the system achieves better error rate performance and faster decoding convergence than conventional approaches on both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels.