Quantum networks face a fundamental challenge absent in classical networks; finite memory coherence times mean that queuing delay directly degrades information quality, causing decoherence that has no classical analog. Existing routing protocols optimize for hop count or channel fidelity while treating scheduling delays as a secondary concern, leaving fidelity vulnerable to congestion-induced decoherence. We present a coherence-aware routing protocol that integrates decoherence constraints into path selection via a priority-modulated aging model derived analytically from Weighted Fair Queueing theory, where high-priority traffic receives compressed effective queue delay. We build a custom discrete-event simulator verified against NetSquid (across 104 states), and evaluate across two structurally diverse topology classes under identical physical parameters, isolating topology structure as the sole independent variable. In all experiments, our protocol is benchmarked against loss-only Dijkstra routing and FIFO scheduling as baselines. On topologies, P2 traffic achieves 96.08% fidelity under a 9x load increase with only 0.04 percentage point degradation, versus a 13.51 percentage point collapse for the loss-only baseline; P2 tail latency holds stable at 0.055 ms while Dijkstra degrades 5.5x. On Barabasi-Albert scale-free topologies, our protocol delivers a +4.12 percentage point fidelity advantage with 97.8% higher aggregate throughput at operational loads over the baseline, with a clearly characterized hub-saturation boundary at 160k QPS. FIFO scheduling provides negligible priority differentiation on both topology classes, providing strong evidence that coherence-aware routing-not scheduling alone is responsible for the observed QoS gains.
Quantum networks face a fundamental challenge absent in classical networks; finite memory coherence times mean that queuing delay directly degrades information quality, causing decoherence that has no classical analog. Existing routing protocols optimize for hop count or channel fidelity while treating scheduling delays as a secondary concern, leaving fidelity vulnerable to congestion-induced decoherence. We present a coherence-aware routing protocol that integrates decoherence constraints into path selection via a priority-modulated aging model derived analytically from Weighted Fair Queueing theory, where high-priority traffic receives compressed effective queue delay. We build a custom discrete-event simulator verified against NetSquid (across 104 states), and evaluate across two structurally diverse topology classes under identical physical parameters, isolating topology structure as the sole independent variable. In all experiments, our protocol is benchmarked against loss-only Dijkstra routing and FIFO scheduling as baselines. On topologies, P2 traffic achieves 96.08% fidelity under a 9x load increase with only 0.04 percentage point degradation, versus a 13.51 percentage point collapse for the loss-only baseline; P2 tail latency holds stable at 0.055 ms while Dijkstra degrades 5.5x. On Barabasi-Albert scale-free topologies, our protocol delivers a +4.12 percentage point fidelity advantage with 97.8% higher aggregate throughput at operational loads over the baseline, with a clearly characterized hub-saturation boundary at 160k QPS. FIFO scheduling provides negligible priority differentiation on both topology classes, providing strong evidence that coherence-aware routing-not scheduling alone is responsible for the observed QoS gains.
Abstract Entanglement-based quantum networks require intelligent routing mechanisms that not only maximize fidelity and connectivity but also ensure service differentiation under varying traffic conditions. In this work, we propose a novel QoS-aware traffic modeling and scheduling framework integrated into a reinforcement learning-based quantum routing agent. Unlike prior approaches that assume deterministic or uniform request arrival patterns, our model introduces stochastic and bursty traffic scenarios using Erlang and ON/OFF distributions to emulate realistic quantum workloads. Each entanglement request is assigned a set of QoS attributes, including fidelity requirements, time-to-live constraints, and priority levels. We then extend the reward function of the agent to consider deadline compliance and resource efficiency in addition to fidelity. Through simulation, we compare the proposed method against state-of-the-art baselines, including DQRA and Proactive RL, under both best-effort and QoS-prioritized scheduling modes. Results demonstrate that our approach maintains higher success rates and lower latency for high-priority requests, while preserving entanglement fidelity and efficient resource allocation across varying network loads. This study highlights the importance of integrating QoS mechanisms into quantum routing to support scalable and differentiated quantum services
For the last decade, layered stacks have dominated the way of reasoning about architectures for quantum networks. However, layered architectures impose stringent design and timing constraints on quantum networks, adding additional latency to the time required to serve an entanglement generation request. Moreover, increasing delays from the layered approach to network control causes degradation of state, effectively minimizing achievable fidelities. In this work we simulate a resource-centric, task-based approach to quantum network control by utilizing a centralized controller. Using the SeQUeNCe quantum network simulator, we implement the centralized controller which tracks quantum memory availability across all nodes, and schedules objectives in an offline fashion using a priority-based scheduler. We evaluate the performance of this controller on multiple topologies (bottleneck, grid, star, caveman) of significant scale, with varying reservation patterns; thereby we demonstrate the viability of the resource-centric task-based quantum network control framework for scaling. Our simulation results show that the caveman and grid topologies have a higher fraction of delivered requests with low delay compared to the star topology, but with a higher fraction of highly delayed requests as well. Furthermore, we find a linear shift of the CDFs in terms of queue size for all topologies depending on the reservation delay. More interestingly, we conclude that the CDFs of priority queues for the star topology converge fast into saturation for increasing request arrival rates, demonstrating together with the other results that the framework is robust for high load scenarios in quantum networks.
Future quantum networks will enable the interconnection of multiple users distributed across vast geographic distances. Due to these large separations and limited physical resources, communication will often rely on multi-path routing strategies, where physical resources are distributed across channels of varying lengths and delivered to end users. Efficient long-distance quantum communication therefore requires optimizing the allocation of these resources across available paths. In this work, we introduce a performance-oriented approach to quantum network routing by extending the classical concept of Quality of Service (QoS) to the context of multi-path quantum resources distribution. Unlike prior models that consider entanglement generation or quantum memory coherence in isolation, we investigate the interplay between path assignment strategies, coherence time constraints, and quantum error correction (QEC), and how they jointly impact end-to-end communication fidelity. We analyze both unencoded and encoded transmissions over aggregated network paths, quantifying the effects of resource allocation on transmission success. Our findings show that fidelity cannot be optimized independently of memory lifetimes, and that while QEC can enhance performance under specific conditions, it also imposes additional constraints depending on network topology and path-length asymmetries. This work provides a foundation for developing QoS-aware quantum routing protocols that balance fidelity, throughput, and memory utilization -- key considerations for near-term quantum repeater networks.
Distributed quantum computing (DQC) connects multiple quantum processing units (QPUs) via quantum interconnects to overcome the qubit-count and connectivity limitations of individual devices. A critical challenge in this paradigm is routing entanglement resources efficiently across the quantum interconnect network so that inter-QPU quantum gates can be executed with high fidelity and minimal resource waste. We propose the Entanglement-Aware Adaptive Routing (EAAR) framework, which jointly optimizes path selection, entanglement purification scheduling, and congestion-aware load balancing for DQC workloads. EAAR models the quantum network as a fidelity-weighted directed graph and transforms the maximum-fidelity path problem into an additive shortest-path problem. An adaptive purification scheduler targets bottleneck links when end-to-end fidelity falls below application-defined thresholds, and a dynamic congestion penalty steers traffic away from over-utilized entanglement buffers. We evaluate EAAR in simulation across grid, ring, random-regular, and small-world topologies ranging from 4 to 24 QPU nodes. Results demonstrate that EAAR improves average remote-gate fidelity by up to 10.3% and reduces entanglement consumption by up to 44.8% compared to greedy baselines, while maintaining competitive latency with shortest-path routing. These findings confirm that holistic, entanglement-aware routing is essential for practical, high-fidelity distributed quantum computation.
Distributed multi-QPU infrastructures share scarce devices across many users, making circuit scheduling a key systems-software challenge. Major providers (Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Quantinuum) still rely on simple priority-based FIFO strategies that preserve fairness but ignore coordinated multi-QPU execution. We propose priority-aware scheduling that casts quantum circuit scheduling as a classical packing problem, integrates with distributed quantum software stacks, and is released as an open-source implementation. Experiments show a 47% reduction in makespan and a 77% throughput increase over industry FIFO, and a 23% improvement over the strongest academic baseline.
The quantum internet enables secure communication, distributed quantum computing, and remote sensing by distributing entanglement among distant nodes [1], [2]. However, establishing end-to-end entanglement across regional networks remains challenging because quantum links experience photon loss, entanglement generation is probabilistic, quantum memories have limited coherence times, and repeater resources are constrained [2], [3]. Conventional shortest-path routing does not jointly account for these quantum-specific limitations. This paper proposes a Fidelity- and Coherence-Aware Dynamic Entanglement Routing (FCADR) framework for regional quantum internet networks. The network is modelled as a graph containing end nodes, quantum repeaters, quantum memories, and lossy entanglement links. FCADR selects routes by jointly considering estimated end-to-end fidelity, entanglement-generation and swapping success probabilities, available quantum-memory capacity, and expected distribution delay. A discrete-event simulation framework is designed to compare FCADR with shortest-path routing, link-success-based routing, and fidelity-aware routing under varying channel loss, coherence time, traffic load, and node or link failures. Performance is evaluated using end-to-end fidelity, request-success rate, distribution delay, memory utilization, and network resilience. The framework aims to improve routing decisions by incorporating quantum-state quality and resource availability into dynamic path selection.