, enabling a stochastic control problem that minimizes FA under budget and memory limits. Two lightweight schedulers, FA-THR and FA-INDEX, approximate Lyapunov-drift-optimal control. Simulations on slotted repeater grids show that FA-aware scheduling preserves throughput while reducing extreme-age events by up to two orders of magnitude. FidelityAge thus provides a tractable, physically grounded metric for reliable and timely entanglement delivery in quantum networks.

DOI: 10.1109/qcnc69040.2026.00051

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F_{\min}

. A renewal formulation links slot-level success probability to long-run average

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