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Communications in Theoretical Physics

Quantum Network Coding on Networks with Arbitrarily Distributed Hidden Channels

Sheng Zhang, Jie Li, Heng-Jie Dong, Jin Liu

Published Oct 1, 2013• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Although perfect quantum network coding has been proved to be achievable, it is still puzzling whether it is feasible whenever one or more of the channels are replaced by the hidden ones emerging from quantum entanglement. The question is answered in this paper. First, we propose a quantum network coding protocol over a butterfly network with two hidden channels. Second, we investigate a more general situation, where d-level quantum letters are transmitted through the network containing arbitrarily distributed hidden channels, and prove that quantum network coding on such networks is still achievable.

DOI
10.1088/0253-6102/60/4/06

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Although perfect quantum network coding has been proved to be achievable, it is still puzzling whether it is feasible whenever one or more of the channels are replaced by the hidden ones emerging from quantum entanglement. The question is answered in this paper. First, we propose a quantum network coding protocol over a butterfly network with two hidden channels. Second, we investigate a more general situation, where d-level quantum letters are transmitted through the network containing arbitrarily distributed hidden channels, and prove that quantum network coding on such networks is still achievable.
This paper considers the problem of efficiently transmitting quantum states through a network. It has been known for some time that without additional assumptions it is impossible to achieve this task perfectly in general — indeed, it is impossible even for the simple butterfly network. As additional resource we allow free classical communication between any pair of network nodes. It is shown that perfect quantum network coding is achievable in this model whenever classical network coding is possible over the same network when replacing all quantum capacities by classical capacities. More precisely, it is proved that perfect quantum network coding using free classical communication is possible over a network with k source-target pairs if there exists a classical linear (or even vector-linear) coding scheme over a finite ring. Our proof is constructive in that we give explicit quantum coding operations for each network node. This paper also gives an upper bound on the number of classical communication required in terms of k, the maximal fan-in of any network node, and the size of the network. x1 x2 s1 ♠ s2 ♠ ❍❍❍❍ ❥ x1 x2 ✟ n1 x1 x1 ⊕ x2 x2 n2 ♠ x1 ⊕ x2✟ ❍❍❍❍ ❥ x1 ⊕ x2
Abstract Distributing quantum state and entanglement between distant nodes is a crucial task in distributed quantum information processing on large-scale quantum networks. Quantum network coding provides an alternative solution for quantum-state distribution, especially when the bottleneck problems must be considered and high communication speed is required. Here, we report the first experimental realization of quantum network coding on the butterfly network. With the help of prior entanglements shared between senders, two quantum states can be transmitted perfectly through the butterfly network. We demonstrate this protocol by employing eight photons generated via spontaneous parametric downconversion. We observe cross-transmission of single-photon states with an average fidelity of 0.9685 ± 0.0013, and that of two-photon entanglement with an average fidelity of 0.9611 ± 0.0061, both of which are greater than the theoretical upper bounds without prior entanglement.
We find a protocol transmitting two quantum states crossly in the butterfly network only with prior entanglement between two senders. This protocol requires only one qubit transmission or two classical bits (cbits) transmission in each channel in the butterfly network. It is also proved that it is impossible without prior entanglement. More precisely, an upper bound of average fidelity is given in the butterfly network when prior entanglement is not allowed. The presented result concerns only the butterfly network, but our techniques can be applied to a more general graph.
In many earlier works, perfect quantum state transmission over the butterfly network can be achieved via quantum network coding protocols with the assist of maximally entangled states. However, in actual quantum networks, a maximally entangled state as auxiliary resource is hard to be obtained or easily turned into a non-maximally entangled state subject to all kinds of environmental noises. Therefore, we propose a more practical quantum network coding scheme with the assist of non-maximally entangled states. In this paper, a practical quantum network coding protocol over grail network is proposed, in which the non-maximally entangled resource is assisted and even the desired quantum state can be perfectly transmitted. The achievable rate region, security and practicability of the proposed protocol are discussed and analyzed. This practical quantum network coding protocol proposed over the grail network can be regarded as a useful attempt to help move the theory of quantum network coding towards practicability.
Network coding is often explained by using a small network model called Butterfly. In this network, there are two flow paths, s_1 to t_1 and s_2 to t_2, which share a single bottleneck channel of capacity one. So, if we consider conventional flow (of liquid, for instance), then the total amount of flow must be at most one in total, say 1/2 for each path. However, if we consider information flow, then we can send two bits (one for each path) at the same time by exploiting two side links, which are of no use for the liquid-type flow, and encoding/decoding operations at each node. This is known as network coding and has been quite popular since its introduction by Ahlswede, Cai, Li and Yeung in 2000. In QIP 2006, Hayashi et al showed that quantum network coding is possible for Butterfly, namely we can send two qubits simultaneously with keeping their fidelity strictly greater than 1/2. In this paper, we show that the result can be extended to a large class of general graphs by using a completely different approach. The underlying technique is a new cloning method called entanglement-free cloning which does not produce any entanglement at all. This seems interesting on its own and to show its possibility is an even more important purpose of this paper. Combining this new cloning with approximation of general quantum states by a small number of fixed ones, we can design a quantum network coding protocol which ``simulates'' its classical counterpart for the same graph.
Quantum network coding with classical assistance can transmit quantum information with fidelity one in error-free quantum channels. However, the dependency on classical network solutions leads to higher communication complexity and transmission congestion over a large-scale network with bottleneck channels. We find that certain types of quantum operation are sufficient to support multiple unicast sessions over the extended butterfly network. Furthermore, this construction decouples classical communication (assisting decoding information) from classical network solution. Based on this design, we propose an optimal protocol for this specific network, which significantly reduces the communication cost.