Optical Routing with Binary Optimisation and Quantum Annealing

• Main Authors: Davies, Ethan, Banfield, Darren, Carare, Vlad, Weaver, Ben, White, Catherine, Walker, Nigel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 12-02-2024
• Subjects: Computer Science - Networking and Internet Architecture
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.07600

A challenge for scalability of demand-responsive, elastic optical Dense
Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) and Flexgrid networks is the
computational complexity of allocating many optical routes on large networks.
We demonstrate that demand satisfaction problems in communication networks can
be formulated as quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation (QUBO) problems,
and solved using a hybrid quantum annealer. Efficient encodings are developed
which solve both unicast and multicast multicommodity-flow problems, while also
adhering to individual requirements for maximum latency and resilience for each
route. We present several QUBO formulations and analyse the qubit scaling. We
demonstrate solutions using a hybrid solver, D-Wave Quantum Advantage QPU.
Progress in generating optimal solutions with efficient use of computational
resources will be beneficial to telecoms operators, enabling them to run
dynamic optical network infrastructures which use resources efficiently, are
resilient to local faults and cyber-attacks, and can be elastically responsive
to demands.