Entanglement-Assisted Communication Networks

Charles H. Bennett

Michael W Barry

Michail A. Zak

Mark M. Wilde

Stephen DiAdamo, Janis Nötzel

This work explores entanglement-assisted communication, where quantum entanglement resources enable the transmission of classical information at an enhanced rate. We consider a scenario where entanglement is distributed ahead of time based on network traffic levels, and simulate a setting where idle nodes generate and store entanglement to later transmit messages at an accelerated rate. We analyze this communication model using noise models for quantum memory in various scenarios, and extend our investigation to a quantum-enhanced distributed computing environment, where entanglement storage enhances data transmission rates for cooperative data processing. We propose a protocol and demonstrate a distributed version of unsupervised clustering. Our results show that, for qubit channels, high rates of entanglement generation and modest storage requirements can surpass the classical limit with entanglement assistance.

Ivan B. Djordjević

Entanglement assisted communication is advocated by numerous authors as an alternative to classical communication offering significant improvement in channel capacity, in particular in noisy regime. In all those papers it is always assumed that entanglement can be distributed without any imperfections, except for attenuation. We demonstrate that under imperfect pre-shared entanglement distribution, assuming that entanglement distribution channel is modeled as a noisy and lossy Bosonic channel, the entanglement assisted communication can be inferior compared to the classical communication, depending on the parameters of the distribution channel. We identify the conditions under which entanglement assistance can still provide an advantage over the classical case. In particular, when both communication and entanglement distribution channels are not used for entanglement assisted communication but rather for classical transmission instead then the classical capacity is always higher than the entanglement assisted capacity. We also study the entanglement assisted communication under the strong atmospheric turbulence effects.