arXiv:1309.2643 · SIAM Journal on Computing
Noisy Interactive Quantum Communication
Gilles Brassard A, Ashwin Nayak, Alain Tapp, Dave Touchette, Falk Unger
Abstract
We study the problem of simulating protocols in a quantum communication setting over noisy channels. This problem falls at the intersection of quantum information theory and quantum communication complexity, and it will be of importance for eventual real-world applications of interactive quantum protocols, which can be proved to have exponentially lower communication costs than their classical counterparts for some problems. These are the first results concerning the quantum version of this problem, originally studied by Schulman in a classical setting [L. J. Schulman, Communication on noisy channels: A coding theorem for computation, in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, IEEE, 1992, pp. 724--733], [L. J. Schulman, Deterministic coding for interactive communication, in Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, ACM, 1993, pp. 747--756]. We simulate a length $N$ quantum communication protocol by a length $O(N)$ protocol with arbitrarily small error. Under adversarial noise, our strategy can withstand, for arbitrarily small $\varepsilon>0$, error rates as high as $1/2-\varepsilon$ when parties preshare perfect entanglement, but the classical channel is noisy. We show that this is optimal. We provide extension of these results in several other models of communication, including when also the entanglement is noisy, and when there is no preshared entanglement but communication is quantum and noisy. We also study the case of random noise, for which we provide simulation protocols with positive communication rates and no preshared entanglement over some quantum channels with quantum capacity $C_Q=0$, proving that $C_Q$ is in general not the right characterization of a channel's capacity for interactive quantum communication. Our results are stated for a general quantum communication protocol in which Alice and Bob collaborate, and these results hold in particular in the quantum communication complexity settings of the Yao and Cleve--Buhrman models.