Quantum-dot cellular automaton (QCA) is an emerging, promising, future generation nanoelectronic computational architecture that encodes binary information as electronic charge configuration of a cell. It is a digital logic architecture that uses single electrons in arrays of quantum dots to perform binary operations. Fundamental unit in building of QCA circuits is a QCA cell. A QCA cell is an elementary building block which can be used to build basic gates and logic devices in QCA architectures. This paper evaluates the performance of various implementations of QCA based XOR gates and proposes various novel layouts with better performance parameters. We presented the various QCA circuit design methodology for XOR gate. These layouts show less number of crossovers and lesser cell count as compared to the conventional layouts already present in the literature. These design topologies have special functions in communication based circuit applications. They are particularly useful in phase detectors in digital circuits, arithmetic operations and error detection & correction circuits. The comparison of various circuit designs is also given. The proposed designs can be effectively used to realize more complex circuits. The simulations in the present work have been carried out using QCADesigner tool.