  This paper consists of three parts. The first part presents a large class of
new binary quasi-cyclic (QC)-LDPC codes with girth of at least 6 whose
parity-check matrices are constructed based on cyclic subgroups of finite
fields. Experimental results show that the codes constructed perform well over
the binary-input AWGN channel with iterative decoding using the sum-product
algorithm (SPA). The second part analyzes the ranks of the parity-check
matrices of codes constructed based on finite fields with characteristic of 2
and gives combinatorial expressions for these ranks. The third part identifies
a subclass of constructed QC-LDPC codes that have large minimum distances.
Decoding of codes in this subclass with the SPA converges very fast.
