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IEEE National Aerospace and Electronics Conference (NAECON)

A Hierarchical Entanglement Routing Protocol in Quantum Networks

C. Papachristou, Matthew Slodov, Frank Wolff

Published Aug 28, 2023• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a hierarchical entanglement routing protocol over the nodes of a quantum network. The objectives are to develop realistic timing parameters of entanglement operations, design the protocol procedure steps, and conduct simulations and performance evaluation. The work has applications to link layer protocols for quantum networks and the future quantum internet.

DOI
10.1109/naecon58068.2023.10365819

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We propose a hierarchical entanglement routing protocol over the nodes of a quantum network. The objectives are to develop realistic timing parameters of entanglement operations, design the protocol procedure steps, and conduct simulations and performance evaluation. The work has applications to link layer protocols for quantum networks and the future quantum internet.
Over the course of the last five decades, there has been substantial growth in conventional network routing design, transitioning from small static node networks to vast systems connecting billions of devices. This evolution has been facilitated by the separation of concerns principle, which involves integrating network functionalities into graph or random network designs and utilizing specific protocols to enable diverse communication capabilities. The landscape of quantum networks is rapidly evolving, presenting new paradigms in information transmission and processing. Routing protocols play a pivotal role in establishing efficient communication pathways within quantum networks, enabling the transmission of quantum states and entanglement across interconnected nodes. The objective of this paper is to shed light on existing entanglement routing design techniques within quantum networks. The design of quantum entanglement routing necessitates a departure from conventional network protocols due to its unique considerations of quantum entanglement and entanglement swapping. However, the implementation of these techniques is fraught with significant challenges, including quantum system decoherence and noise, limitations on communication ranges, and the need for specialized hardware. The paper initiates by surveying critical research in quantum routing design techniques, then delves into essential aspects of the routing concept, associated quantum operations, and the step-wise process for establishing efficient and resilient quantum networks. In summary, this paper provides an overview of the current landscape of quantum entanglement routing techniques. It outlines their core principles, protocols, and challenges, while also highlighting potential applications and charting future directions for research and development.
Quantum networks enable a number of important applications such as quantum key distribution. The basic function of a quantum network is to enable long-distance quantum entanglement between two remote communication parties. This work focuses on the entanglement routing problem, whose objective is to build long-distance entanglements for the concurrent source-destination pairs through multiple hops. Different from existing works that analyzes the traditional routing techniques on special network topologies, we present a comprehensive entanglement routing model that reflects the differences between quantum networks and classical networks and new entanglement routing algorithms that utilize the unique properties of quantum networks. Evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm Q-CAST increases the number of successful long-distance entanglements by a big margin compared to other methods. The model and simulator developed by this work may encourage more network researchers to study the entanglement routing problem.
Quantum networks are considered as a promising future platform for quantum information exchange and quantum applications, which have capabilities far beyond the traditional communication networks. Remote quantum entanglement is an essential component of a quantum network. How to efficiently design a multi-routing entanglement protocol is a fundamental yet challenging problem. In this paper, we study a quantum entanglement routing problem to simultaneously maximize the number of quantum-user pairs and their expected throughput. Our approach is to formulate the problem as two sequential integer programming steps. We propose efficient entanglement routing algorithms for the two integer programming steps and analyze their time complexity and performance bounds. Results of evaluation highlight that our approach outperforms existing solutions in both served quantum-user pairs numbers and the network expected throughput.
A quantum network promises to enable long distance quantum communication, and assemble small quantum devices into a large quantum computing cluster. Each network node can thereby be seen as a small few qubit quantum computer. Qubits can be sent over direct physical links connecting nearby quantum nodes, or by means of teleportation over pre-established entanglement amongst distant network nodes. Such pre-shared entanglement effectively forms a shortcut - a virtual quantum link - which can be used exactly once. Here, we present an abstraction of a quantum network that allows ideas from computer science to be applied to the problem of routing qubits, and manage entanglement in the network. Specifically, we consider a scenario in which each quantum network node can create EPR pairs with its immediate neighbours over a physical connection, and perform entanglement swapping operations in order to create long distance virtual quantum links. We proceed to discuss the features unique to quantum networks, which call for the development of new routing techniques. As an example, we present two simple hierarchical routing schemes for a quantum network of N nodes for a ring and sphere topology. For these topologies we present efficient routing algorithms requiring O(log N) qubits to be stored at each network node, O(polylog N) time and space to perform routing decisions, and O(log N) timesteps to replenish the virtual quantum links in a model of entanglement generation.
A quantum repeater is the heart of a quantum internet that enables end-to-end communication over long distances using the quantum entanglement feature. Although this characteristic gives quantum networks tremendous power in terms of speed and security, it puts quantum networks, especially the quantum internet, in front of challenges, like transforming a short-distance quantum link into a long-distance link, in addition to entanglement routing for finding the best path within a quantum network. So, this research aims to propose a hybrid quantum routing protocol (HQRP) based on routing metrics of the classical networks like hops count, as well as metrics of the quantum network represented by the possibility of entanglement between end nodes in the network. As a result, a mathematical model was built to determine the optimal path among many paths within the quantum network, and it was implemented on our quantum network simulator. Finally, we concluded that the proposed algorithm gives the optimal path based on the highest entanglement probability and lowest number of hop count.
Quantum repeater networks are a fundamental of any future quantum internet and long-distance quantum communications. The entangled quantum nodes can communicate through several different levels of entanglement, leading to a heterogeneous, multilevel network structure. The level of entanglement between the quantum nodes determines the hop distance and the probability of the existence of an entangled link in the network. Here, we define a decentralized routing for entangled quantum networks. The proposed method allows an efficient routing to find the shortest paths in entangled quantum networks by using only local knowledge of the quantum nodes. We give bounds on the maximum value of the total number of entangled links of a path. The proposed scheme can be directly applied in practical quantum communications and quantum networking scenarios.