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Optimal Receiver Design for Quantum Communication

Rahul Kumar Bhadani

Published Jan 1, 2021• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

An important problem in quantum information theory is finding the best possible performance of the optical communication channel employing suitable codewords, receiver design, and constellation optimization techniques. Many receiver designs have been studied in the past to discriminate Phase-Shift Keying (PSK) quantum states that are used to encode information before transmitting over the communication channel. Among many types of quantum states, there has been significant work on the use of coherent states for encoding information. Previous work has sought to improve the communication performance in terms of various metrics such as error probability of state discrimination and capacities by employing a number of quantum states such as coherent states and squeezed-displaced states. In this thesis, we provide optimal receiver design employing coherent states and squeezed-displaced states to maximize the mutual information and lower the error probability of state discrimination. In the case of pure coherent states, we derive an alternative channel capacity of phase-shift keying coherent state with a realizable displacement receiver by maximizing mutual information over symbol priors and pre-detection displacement. We find that the capacity is higher than the capacity achieved by maximizing mutual information over symbol prior but with zero displacements. The overall scheme demonstrates designing an improved, yet easy-to-implement receiver for better communication performance by tuning it at different photon number regime. We also explore the use of squeezing operations with a displacement receiver for state discrimination. Our calculation demonstrates that we see no performance improvement in terms of the probability of error of state discrimination or mutual information using displacement receivers when optimal squeezing on the transmitter side is used. In addition, we also study the receiver design scheme for QPSK modulation where squeezing is employed at the receiver side. We find that using the squeezing operation on the receiver side provides an advantage in terms of increased mutual information for the low-photon number regime compared to when no squeezing is used. In the later part of the thesis, we study entanglement-assisted communication using two-mode squeezing vacuum. The use of pre-shared entanglement in entanglement-assisted communication provides a superior alternative to classical communication specifically in the low brightness regime and highly noisy environment. In this thesis, we analyze the performance of a few low-complexity receivers that employ optical parametric amplifiers. In the simulation, we demonstrate that receiver designs with an entanglement-assisted scheme using phase-shift-keying modulation can outperform classical capacities. We describe a newly proposed 2x2 optical hybrid receiver for entanglement-assisted communication whose performance is roughly 10% better in terms of error probability as compared to previously proposed optical parametric amplifier-based receivers. Further, we find that using unequal priors for BPSK provides approximately three times the advantage over equal priors in terms of information rate.

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Optics Express•Jan 27, 2026•1 citation
An important problem in quantum information theory is finding the best possible performance of the optical communication channel employing suitable codewords, receiver design, and constellation optimization techniques. Many receiver designs have been studied in the past to discriminate Phase-Shift Keying (PSK) quantum states that are used to encode information before transmitting over the communication channel. Among many types of quantum states, there has been significant work on the use of coherent states for encoding information. Previous work has sought to improve the communication performance in terms of various metrics such as error probability of state discrimination and capacities by employing a number of quantum states such as coherent states and squeezed-displaced states. In this thesis, we provide optimal receiver design employing coherent states and squeezed-displaced states to maximize the mutual information and lower the error probability of state discrimination. In the case of pure coherent states, we derive an alternative channel capacity of phase-shift keying coherent state with a realizable displacement receiver by maximizing mutual information over symbol priors and pre-detection displacement. We find that the capacity is higher than the capacity achieved by maximizing mutual information over symbol prior but with zero displacements. The overall scheme demonstrates designing an improved, yet easy-to-implement receiver for better communication performance by tuning it at different photon number regime. We also explore the use of squeezing operations with a displacement receiver for state discrimination. Our calculation demonstrates that we see no performance improvement in terms of the probability of error of state discrimination or mutual information using displacement receivers when optimal squeezing on the transmitter side is used. In addition, we also study the receiver design scheme for QPSK modulation where squeezing is employed at the receiver side. We find that using the squeezing operation on the receiver side provides an advantage in terms of increased mutual information for the low-photon number regime compared to when no squeezing is used. In the later part of the thesis, we study entanglement-assisted communication using two-mode squeezing vacuum. The use of pre-shared entanglement in entanglement-assisted communication provides a superior alternative to classical communication specifically in the low brightness regime and highly noisy environment. In this thesis, we analyze the performance of a few low-complexity receivers that employ optical parametric amplifiers. In the simulation, we demonstrate that receiver designs with an entanglement-assisted scheme using phase-shift-keying modulation can outperform classical capacities. We describe a newly proposed 2x2 optical hybrid receiver for entanglement-assisted communication whose performance is roughly 10% better in terms of error probability as compared to previously proposed optical parametric amplifier-based receivers. Further, we find that using unequal priors for BPSK provides approximately three times the advantage over equal priors in terms of information rate.
Many receiver designs have been studied in the past to discriminate Phase-Shift Keying (PSK) quantum states that are used to encode information before transmitting over the communication channel. Among many types of quantum states, there has been significant work on the use of coherent states for encoding information. Previous work has sought to improve the communication performance in terms of various metrics such as error probability of state discrimination and capacities by employing more complex quantum states such as squeezed-displaced states. One of the simplest receivers for state discrimination is the displacement receiver. However, our calculation demonstrates that when we use optimal parameters for a displacement receiver, squeezed-displaced states might not be necessary, and merely using coherent states suffice. We see no performance improvement in terms of probability of error of state discrimination as well as mutual information using displacement receivers when optimal squeezing parameters are used with squeezing operation on the transmitter side for BPSK and QPSK. In addition, we also study the receiver design scheme for QPSK modulation where squeezing is employed at the receiver side. We find that using squeezing operation on the receiver side just before detection provides an advantage in terms of increased mutual information for the low-photon regime compared to when no squeezing is used. For all other cases, squeezing offers no additional advantage.
An important problem in quantum information theory is finding the best possible capacity of the optical communication channel employing suitable codewords, receiver design, and constellation optimization techniques. In this paper, we derive an alternative channel capacity, CG, of phase-shift keying coherent state with a realizable displacement receiver by maximizing mutual information over symbol priors and pre-detection displacement. We find that CGis higher than the capacity achieved by maximizing mutual information over symbol prior but with zero displacement. The overall scheme demonstrates designing an improved, yet easy-to-implement receiver for better communication performance by tuning it at different photon number regime. Further, we present a comparative analysis of CGwith existing receiver designs. We extend our study to account for detector imperfections.imperfections.
The use of pre-shared entanglement in entanglement-assisted communication offers a superior alternative to classical communication, especially in the photon-starved regime and highly noisy environments. In this paper, we analyze the performance of several low-complexity receivers that use optical parametric amplifiers. The simulations demonstrate that receivers employing an entanglement-assisted scheme with phase-shift-keying modulation can outperform classical capacities. We present a 2x2 optical hybrid receiver for entanglement-assisted communication and show that it has a roughly 10% lower error probability compared to previously proposed optical parametric amplifier-based receivers for more than 10 modes. However, the capacity of the optical parametric amplifier-based receiver exceeds the Holevo capacity and the capacities of the optical phase conjugate receiver and 2x2 optical hybrid receiver in the case of a single mode. The numerical findings indicate that surpassing the Holevo and Homodyne capacities does not require a large number of signal-idler modes. Furthermore, we find that using unequal priors for BPSK provides roughly three times the information rate advantage over equal priors.
We propose an inverse-squeezing Kennedy receiver for discriminating binary phase-shift-keyed displaced squeezed vacuum states. The receiver combines a Kennedy-type nulling displacement, an orthogonally oriented inverse-squeezing operation and photon-number-resolving detection with a maximum-a-\emph{posteriori} threshold rule. Its key mechanism is that the inverse-squeezing stage converts transmitter-side squeezing into enhanced photon-number contrast, or equivalently an effective coherent-state energy gain, that can be directly exploited at the measurement stage. Under ideal equal-prior conditions, the receiver surpasses the standard quantum limit for squeezed-state binary phase-shift keying at approximately N≈0.3N\approx 0.3N≈0.3, outperforms the Helstrom bound of coherent-state binary phase-shift keying at approximately N≈0.4N\approx 0.4N≈0.4, and reaches the 1\% error level near N≈0.6N\approx 0.6N≈0.6. We further analyze its performance under realistic imperfections, including finite detector efficiency, dark counts, channel phase diffusion, receiver thermal noise and transmission loss. The results show that adaptive thresholding preserves robust performance against detector and noise imperfections over practical parameter ranges, whereas transmission loss progressively suppresses the squeezing-enabled advantage. These findings indicate that, for the fixed source parametrization adopted in this work, the proposed receiver is most advantageous in the low-loss regime, especially at low source energies.
This paper proposes a multichannel optimal squeezing-displacement receiver (MOSDR) with photon-number-resolving detectors for discriminating binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) coherent states. Unlike previous squeezing-based receivers whose gain is largely limited to the low photon-number regime, we partition the input signal into multiple channels so that the mean photon number in each channel is reduced, allowing the squeezing operation to be used more effectively in its favorable operating region. In addition, we use displacement feedforward between channels and accumulate the per-channel discrimination outcomes through a sequential decision process, thereby reducing the overall error probability. We analyze MOSDR under an ideal detector as well as under quantum efficiency, dark counts and visibility reduction. The results show that MOSDR outperforms an optimized-displacement multichannel displacement feedforward receiver and remains below the standard quantum limit over a wide photon-number range, exhibiting improved robustness to detection imperfections.