Long-distance quantum communication relies on quantum repeaters to overcome exponential photon attenuation in optical fiber links. Connecting adjacent elementary links requires entanglement swapping, while preserving end-to-end fidelity above cryptographic thresholds requires entanglement distillation. In physical hardware, however, quantum memories suffer from decoherence during the classical round-trip signaling intervals mandated by distillation protocols. This work investigates the architectural trade-off between two core operational strategies in a dual-hop quantum repeater: Strategy A (Purify-then-Swap), wherein elementary links are distilled prior to swapping, and Strategy B (Swap-then-Purify), wherein raw links are swapped immediately and distillation is executed end-to-end. We develop an analytical and numerical simulation pipeline tracking Werner state transformations under bilateral CNOT purification and non-Markovian memory dephasing. Our results reveal an exact crossover tipping point at tau_RTT / T_2 ≈ 0.018: whenever classical signaling delay exceeds 1.8% of the memory coherence time, Strategy B strictly outperforms Strategy A. Furthermore, we show that local purification becomes actively destructive beyond tau_RTT / T_2 ≈ 0.070, delivering fidelities inferior to unpurified swapping. Finally, we establish the minimum hardware boundary, showing that raw elementary links must achieve F_init >= 0.880 for single-round purification to cross the threshold for secret key distillation (F > 0.810).
Long-distance quantum communication relies on quantum repeaters to overcome exponential photon attenuation in optical fiber links. Connecting adjacent elementary links requires entanglement swapping, while preserving end-to-end fidelity above cryptographic thresholds requires entanglement distillation. In physical hardware, however, quantum memories suffer from decoherence during the classical round-trip signaling intervals mandated by distillation protocols. This work investigates the architectural trade-off between two core operational strategies in a dual-hop quantum repeater: Strategy A (Purify-then-Swap), wherein elementary links are distilled prior to swapping, and Strategy B (Swap-then-Purify), wherein raw links are swapped immediately and distillation is executed end-to-end. We develop an analytical and numerical simulation pipeline tracking Werner state transformations under bilateral CNOT purification and non-Markovian memory dephasing. Our results reveal an exact crossover tipping point at tau_RTT / T_2 ≈ 0.018: whenever classical signaling delay exceeds 1.8% of the memory coherence time, Strategy B strictly outperforms Strategy A. Furthermore, we show that local purification becomes actively destructive beyond tau_RTT / T_2 ≈ 0.070, delivering fidelities inferior to unpurified swapping. Finally, we establish the minimum hardware boundary, showing that raw elementary links must achieve F_init >= 0.880 for single-round purification to cross the threshold for secret key distillation (F > 0.810).
Entanglement distillation and entanglement swapping have been extensively studied assuming perfect quantum memories. However, near-term quantum networks will be fundamentally limited by quantum memories with a finite coherence time, resulting in complex choices for the timing and ordering of these operations. In this work, we study entanglement distillation and entanglement swapping at the level of the elementary building blocks of noisy quantum repeater networks, with the goal of elucidating the fundamental tradeoffs induced by memory decoherence. First, we focus on a minimal one-hop setting, where we analytically compare ``distill-as-soon-as-possible'' and ``distill-as-late-as-possible'' strategies against a baseline strategy that simply discards the older entangled state. We find that in the low memory coherence time regime, discarding the older entangled state achieves higher expected output fidelity, while in the high coherence time regime, delaying distillation until the end achieves the highest expected output fidelity and, over most of the deadline range, the highest weighted coherent information, at the expense of a lower success probability. We then extend our analysis to two-hop repeater chains using Monte Carlo simulation. In this setting, we find that the highest weighted coherent information is achieved by strategies that defer distillation to the end of the time window, with \textsf{Distill-ALAP-then-Swap-ALAP} and \textsf{Swap-ASAP-then-Distill-ALAP} leading at different operating points, while \textsf{Discard-Oldest-then-Swap} never reaches positive weighted coherent information in any regime tested. Together, these results clarify how decoherence reshapes the optimal operation timing in quantum networks and provide instructive insights into the link-level principles that govern larger-scale architectures.
Long-distance quantum communication requires reliable entanglement distribution, but direct generation with protocols such as Barrett--Kok suffers from exponentially decreasing success probability with distance, making it impractical over hundreds of kilometers. Quantum repeaters address this by segmenting the channel and combining entanglement generation, swapping, and purification. In this work, we present a simulation framework for chain-based repeaters under continuous-time depolarizing noise. Our model implements heralded entanglement generation, Bell-state swapping, and multi-round purification, with configurable chain length, noise levels, and purification depth. Numerical results highlight how memory decoherence constrains performance, how purification mitigates fidelity loss, and how time and entanglement costs scale with distance. While simplified, the framework offers a flexible tool for exploring trade-offs in repeater design and provides a basis for extensions toward more complex network scenarios.
Entanglement purification with two entangled resource pairs is widely employed in the literature on quantum repeater networks to counteract fidelity degradation introduced by noisy quantum memories and entanglement swapping across multiple hops. Standard purification protocols assume both resource pairs carry identical fidelity. In practice, entanglement generation is stochastic, the two resource pairs are heralded at different times, and so the first pair decoheres in memory while the second is being generated. Thus a fidelity asymmetry is a structural feature of any network operating under realistic memory conditions, leading to the question: when is it beneficial to perform purification? We derive a closed-form fidelity asymmetry tolerance delta(F) that governs whether a purification attempt is beneficial. We determine a universal upper bound delta_max of approximately 0.076 beyond which purification is always counterproductive. Our simulations show that with exponential memory decoherence, purification yields benefits in only approximately 14% of purification attempts on two resource pairs in a two-hop repeater chain. We define three network objectives: fidelity only, time only, and a combination of time and fidelity, to deliver end-to-end entanglement. We show that when the application fidelity requirement is achievable through swapping alone, no-purification is the superior policy, with its advantage increasing with the number of hops. When the fidelity requirement cannot be met with swapping alone and purification is necessary, to be effective, it must be conditioned on delta(F) between resource pairs. We introduce DeltaPurify, a policy that conditions purification decisions on local fidelity information, and show it reduces time-to-serve relative to both naive purification and no-purification across several fidelity thresholds and hops of a repeater chain.
When built, quantum repeater networks will require classical network protocols to control the quantum operations. However, existing work on repeaters has focused on the quantum operations themselves, with less attention paid to the contents, semantics, ordering and reliability of the classical control messages. In this work we define and describe our implementation of the classical control protocols. The state machines and packet sequences for the three protocol layers are presented, and operation confirmed by running the protocols over simulations of the physical network. We also show that proper management of the resources in a bottleneck link allows the aggregate throughput of two end-to-end flows to substantially exceed that of a single flow. Our layered architectural framework will support independent evolution of the separate protocol layers. Networks of quantum repeaters utilize three concepts to execute a distributed algorithm that creates entangled quantum states between nodes that are far apart: a basic entanglement mechanism which depends on the physical implementation, error management (in this work, we study a method known as purification), and finally a quantum state propagation layer (here we implement entanglement swapping, which builds multi-hop connections from single-hop connections). Some researchers are investigating approaches that are substantially different from entanglement swapping [30, 24, 19]. Here we focus on swapping, but the layered architecture approach is broadly applicable, allowing other implementations to replace only a single layer in the protocol stack. Previous work primarily focused on the physical and mathematical tools for building repeaters. Classical information is also needed to enable teleportation and swapping, as many quantum operations are not deterministic, and results of quantum measurements need to be reported to distant partners before further operations can proceed. Also, operations in the middle of the network must be coordinated to route and swap properly. This requires classical messages to make operations robust, but message propagation times penalize performance. Even though this delay is usually included in repeater simulations, prior work has not defined the protocols in detail, especially with respect to how all of the nodes make consistent decisions in a timely fashion. In this work, we introduce a protocol stack for networks of quantum repeaters that considers all the necessary classical messages and which can be easily adapted for different approaches at all three protocol layers. We run simulations of competing flows on a dumbbell topology in order to increase our confidence in the behavior of our network protocols. By adjusting the fidelity thresholds required for entanglement swapping, we show that some configurations boost the aggregate throughput for multiple flows significantly above the maximum for a single flow, taking advantage of resources that would otherwise sit idle. The operation of such complex networks and such delicate tuning of the system without formal protocol definitions would not be possible. Previous work has also concentrated almost exclusively on the dedicated use of a single line or chain of repeaters, delivering Bell pairs only to the two nodes at the ends of the chain. Networks, however, typically have more than two end points, and allow any pair of these end nodes to communicate. More topologically complex networks, with numerous end nodes, are obviously much more scalable than connecting every possible pair of nodes using a dedicated line of repeaters. we investigate how classical multiplexing schemes translate to the domain of quantum repeaters, in order to manage shared resources and active communication flows of data from different stations. We simulate four sharing protocols in a complex network with competing traffic. Circuit switching gives any individual flow the best performance, but makes poor use of the overall network and is inflexible. We use circuit switching as our baseline case to compare time division multiplexing, buffer space multiplexing, and statistical multiplexing, and show that all multiplexing schemes are better than circuit switching. For the particular network simulated, we find that statistical multiplexing outperforms time division multiplexing by 28% and buffer space multiplexing by 13%. We find that all three multiplexing schemes are fair; each flow is penalized a similar percentage of its throughput as the the total number of users in the network increases. Finally, statistical multiplexing requires no network-wide coordination of the use of quantum memory or channels, and is easier to implement than a robust, scalable scheme for the other protocols. Our current results suggest that the best strategy for quantum repeater networks is statistical multiplexing. (This is in fact the quantum analogue of the basis on which the Internet works.) However, our current simulations are done with no degradation of memory over time, using the assumption of quantum error-corrected memory at each repeater; inclusion of decoherence and a finite qubit lifetime remains as future work.
Quantum data-center networks must distribute entanglement between QPUs over paths whose length grows with system scale, but each entanglement-swapping step reduces the quality of the raw end-to-end state. Topology, multiplexing, and repeated connection attempts can increase the number of raw end-to-end copies available for a request, yet they do not answer the central resource question: whether those copies are sufficient to remove, via entanglement purification, the fidelity loss caused by multi-hop distribution. We study this question through a topology-independent black-box model of the network. Each elementary link is modeled as a Werner state with parameter w0, so ideal swapping over an ℓ-link path produces equal-quality raw copies with Werner parameter w0ℓ; purification succeeds if it outputs at least one state with Werner parameter at least w0 with probability at least pth. We compare recursive BBPSSW purification with higher-order r-to-1 bilocal-Clifford purification protocols of Jansen \emph{et al.}, using an all-in recursive schedule whose success probability is computed by exact dynamic programming. The resulting resource landscapes show a threshold structure governed by the Werner entanglement condition w0ℓ>1/3 and demonstrate that multi-copy purification substantially improves both feasibility and copy efficiency. Across the evaluated grid, the Jansen family requires fewer copies than BBPSSW at more than 96% of shared feasible points; at pth=0.70, the median copy budget drops from 268 to 30. These results provide a quantitative purification-resource benchmark for assessing whether future quantum data-center architectures can practically support hop-independent end-to-end entanglement quality.
Entanglement routing establishes entangled pairs between distant nodes of a quantum network by purifying and swapping pairs generated on elementary links. Existing methods typically restrict the decision space along two axes: the operation order, often fixed to purify-then-swap (PtS), and the purification schedule of each link, often restricted to pumping. Focusing on linear repeater chains with finite link capacities, we relax both restrictions and study the maximization of the expected end-to-end throughput subject to a fidelity threshold under two quantum-noise models. We develop a unified capacity-aware optimization framework comprising an exact mixed-integer linear program (MILP) under PtS, instantiated with either pumping or general tree purification schedules, and an exact dynamic program (DP) over arbitrary operation orders. Under symmetric Pauli noise, we prove that pumping converges to a fidelity strictly below unity, imposing a capacity-independent feasibility bound and a maximum chain length on every pumping-based PtS method, whereas general tree schedules yield a capacity-dependent bound. We further prove that post-swap purification never increases the throughput, so a free operation order can only increase feasibility. Numerical evaluations confirm the bounds: tree schedules serve over 90\% of the requests that pumping cannot at moderate fidelity thresholds; within the pumping class, a free operation order recovers much of this advantage; but once links use tree schedules, the tree-based MILP and the order-exact DP serve identical request sets throughout. Operation order and purification schedule are thus substitutes, with the purification schedule the dominant factor governing feasibility under symmetric Pauli noise.