Quantum networks create a completely new way for communication, and the most important function of a quantum network is to generate long-distance quantum entanglement to serve a number of quantum applications. As the scale of the network expands, in order to establish end-to-end entanglement between two remote nodes, entangled pairs need to be generated and distributed among multiple repeaters along the path from the source to the destination, which requires a specific protocol to negotiate resource allocations and quantum operations among the repeaters. Thus, to realize such remote entanglement distribution in a quantum network, designing a stable and reliable protocol becomes urgent and necessary. In this article, we focus on how to guarantee the generation rate of entangled pairs between any two quantum nodes to meet the requirements of various quantum applications in a large-scale quantum network. We present a connection-oriented entanglement distribution protocol inspired by the connection-oriented communication model in classical networks. Our protocol is located in the network layer of the quantum network to enable end-to-end quantum communication. Three main features are provided by the proposed protocol: 1) it is reliable and can guarantee the successful entanglement generation; 2) it can reduce the influence of quantum decoherence via reducing the latency caused by resource competition; and 3) it can guarantee the rate of generating entanglement between two quantum nodes according to the requirement of quantum applications. INDEX TERMSConnection-oriented protocol, entanglement distribution, quantum networks. Engineering uantum Transactions on IEEE Li et al.: CONNECTION-ORIENTED ENTANGLEMENT DISTRIBUTION DESIGN IN QUANTUM NETWORKS FIGURE 1. Illustration of teleportation and entanglement swapping. (a) Teleportation. (b) Entanglement swapping. Engineering uantumTransactions on IEEE II. RELATED WORK
As one of the most important function in quantum networks, entanglement routing, i.e., how to efficiently establish remote entanglement connection between two arbitrary quantum nodes, becomes a critical problem that is worth to be studied. However, the entanglement fidelity, which can be regarded as the most important metric to evaluate the quality of connection, is rarely considered in existing works. Thus, in this paper, we propose purification-enabled entanglement routing designs to provide fidelity guarantee for multiple Source-Destination (S-D) pairs in quantum networks. To find the routing path with minimum entangled pair cost, we first design an iterative routing algorithm for single S-D pair, called Q-PATH, to find the optimal solution. After that, due to the relatively high computational complexity, we also design a low-complexity routing algorithm by using an extended dijkstra algorithm, called Q-LEAP, to efficiently find the near-optimal solution. Based on these two algorithms, we design a utility metric to solve the resource allocation problem for multiple S-D pairs, and further design a greedy-based algorithm considering resource allocation and rerouting process for routing requests from multiple S-D pairs. To verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithms, extensive simulations are conducted compared to the existing purification-enabled routing algorithm. The simulation results show that, compared with the traditional routing scheme, the proposed algorithms not only can provide fidelity-guaranteed routing solutions under various scenarios, but also has superior performance in terms of throughput, fidelity of end-to-end entanglement connection, and resource utilization ratio.
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