The dawn of the quantum internet

Neil J. Ross

Michael Brooks

Fabio Cavaliere, Rana Pratap Sircar, Tommaso Catuogno

Marcello Caleffi, Jessica Illiano, Seid Koudia +1 more

Internet just turned 50: five decades that shaped the world we live in. Indeed, Internet itself evolved astonishingly since the beginning, from a network prototype consisting of a few static nodes in the early days to a leviathan interconnecting with billions of devices half of the world’s population. Yet the fundamental assumption underlying Internet’s design – i.e., transmitting messages that can be encoded in a sequence of classical bits – remained unchanged during these five decades. But the dawn of the engineering phase of quantum technologies is challenging Internet’s fundamental assumption. Quantum devices demand for communication primitives – namely, the ability to distribute entangled states and to transmit quantum information – governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Hence, principles and phenomena with no counterpart in classical networks require a major network-paradigm shift to harness the quantum mechanics specificities. This presentation aims at shedding light on the challenges and the open problems arising with the design of a protocol stack for the Quantum Internet.

Claudio Cicconetti, Marco Conti, Andrea Passarella

In the coming years, quantum networks will allow quantum applications to thrive thanks to the new opportunities offered by end-to-end entanglement of qubits on remote hosts via quantum repeaters. On a geographical scale, this will lead to the dawn of the quantum internet. While a fullblown deployment is yet to come, the research community is already working on a variety of individual enabling technologies and solutions. In this article, with the guidance of extensive simulations, we take a broader view and investigate the problems of quality of service (QoS) and provisioning in the context of quantum networks, which are very different from their counterparts in classical data networks due to some of their fundamental properties. Our work leads the way toward a new class of studies that will allow the research community to better understand the challenges of quantum networks and their potential commercial exploitation.

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