Quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check （QC-LDPC） codes can be constructed conveniently by cyclic lifting of protographs. For the purpose of eliminating short cycles in the Tanner graph to guarantee performance, first an algorithm to enumerate the harmful short cycles in the protograph is designed, and then a greedy algorithm is proposed to assign proper permutation shifts to the circulant permutation submatrices in the parity check matrix after lifting. Compared with the existing deterministic edge swapping （DES） algorithms, the proposed greedy algorithm adds more constraints in the assignment of permutation shifts to improve performance. Simulation results verify that it outperforms DES in reducing short cycles. In addition, it is proved that the parity check matrices of the cyclic lifted QC-LDPC codes can be transformed into block lower triangular ones when the lifting factor is a power of 2. Utilizing this property, the QC- LDPC codes can be encoded by preprocessing the base matrices, which reduces the encoding complexity to a large extent.
