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arXiv:2408.15758

Performance of Cascade and LDPC-codes for Information Reconciliation on Industrial Quantum Key Distribution Systems

Ronny Müller, Claudia De Lazzari, Fernando Chirici, Ilaria Vagniluca, Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe, Søren O. Forchhammer, Alessandro Zavatta, Davide Bacco

Published Aug 28, 2024• 1 citation
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Abstract

Information Reconciliation is a critical component of Quantum Key Distribution, ensuring that mismatches between Alice's and Bob's keys are corrected. In this study, we analyze, simulate, optimize, and compare the performance of two prevalent algorithms used for Information Reconciliation: Cascade and LDPC codes in combination with the Blind protocol. We focus on their applicability in practical and industrial settings, operating in realistic and application-close conditions. The results are further validated through evaluation on a live industrial QKD system.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2408.15758

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Information Reconciliation is a critical component of Quantum Key Distribution, ensuring that mismatches between Alice's and Bob's keys are corrected. In this study, we analyze, simulate, optimize, and compare the performance of two prevalent algorithms used for Information Reconciliation: Cascade and LDPC codes in combination with the Blind protocol. We focus on their applicability in practical and industrial settings, operating in realistic and application-close conditions. The results are further validated through evaluation on a live industrial QKD system.
ABSTRACT Information reconciliation is a critical component of quantum key distribution, ensuring that mismatches between Alice's and Bob's keys are corrected. In this study, we analyse, simulate, optimise and compare the performance of two prevalent algorithms used for information reconciliation: Cascade and LDPC codes in combination with the blind protocol. We focus on their applicability in practical and industrial settings, operating in realistic and application‐close conditions. The results are further validated through evaluation on a live industrial QKD system.
Information reconciliation is a crucial procedure in the classical post-processing of quantum key distribution (QKD). Poor reconciliation efficiency, revealing more information than strictly needed, may compromise the maximum attainable distance, while poor performance of the algorithm limits the practical throughput in a QKD device. Historically, reconciliation has been mainly done using close to minimal information disclosure but heavily interactive procedures, like \textit{Cascade}, or using less efficient but also less interactive ---just one message is exchanged--- procedures, like the ones based in low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The price to pay in the LDPC case is that good efficiency is only attained for very long codes and in a very narrow range centered around the quantum bit error rate (QBER) that the code was designed to reconcile, thus forcing to have several codes if a broad range of QBER needs to be catered for. Real world implementations of these methods are thus very demanding, either on computational or communication resources or both, to the extent that the last generation of GHz clocked QKD systems are finding a bottleneck in the classical part. In order to produce compact, high performance and reliable QKD systems it would be highly desirable to remove these problems. Here we analyse the use of short-length LDPC codes in the information reconciliation context using a low interactivity, \textit{blind}, protocol that avoids an a priori error rate estimation. We demonstrate that 2×1032 \times 10^32×103 bits length LDPC codes are suitable for blind reconciliation. Such codes are of high interest in practice, since they can be used for hardware implementations with very high throughput.
It is widely accepted in the quantum cryptography community that interactive information reconciliation protocols, such as cascade, are ineffcient due to the communication overhead. Instead, non-interactive information reconciliation protocols based on i.e. LDPC codes or, more recently, polar codes have been proposed. In this work, we argue that interactive protocols should be taken into consideration in modern quantum key distribution systems. In particular, we demonstrate how to improve the performance of cascade by proper implementation and use. Our implementation of cascade reaches a throughput above 80 Mbps under realistic conditions. This is more than four times the throughput previously demonstrated in any information reconciliation protocol.
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We develop a new approach for asymmetric LDPC-based information reconciliation in order to adapt to the current channel state and achieve better performance and scalability in practical resource-constrained QKD systems. The new scheme combines the advantages of LDPC codes, a priori error rate estimation, rate-adaptive and blind information reconciliation techniques. We compare the performance of several asymmetric and symmetric error correction schemes using a real industrial QKD setup. The proposed asymmetric algorithm achieves significantly higher throughput, providing a secret key rate that is close to the symmetric one in a wide range of error rates. Thus, our approach is found to be particularly efficient for applications with high key rates, limited classical channel capacity and asymmetric computational resource allocation.