Fragmentation-Aware Entanglement Routing for Quantum Networks

• Published in: Journal of lightwave technology Vol. 39; no. 14; pp. 4584 - 4591
• Main Authors: Zhang, Shengyu, Shi, Shouqian, Qian, Chen, Yeung, Kwan L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 15-07-2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; entanglement routing; Fragmentation; Internet; Quantum channel; Quantum cryptography; Quantum entanglement; quantum internet; Quantum networks; Qubit; Qubits (quantum computing); Repeaters; Routing
• ISSN: 0733-8724; 1558-2213
• DOI: 10.1109/JLT.2021.3070859

New capabilities enabled by quantum networks, e.g. quantum key distribution, rely on the concurrent quantum entanglements via multiple untrusted repeaters between the source-destination pairs, which is known as quantum routing. Existing quantum routing algorithms pre-assign the free qubits to specific paths, in order to avoid resource contention in the process of entanglement swapping. Since not all pre-assigned qubits can be utilized, the resource fragmentation problem caused can limit the network throughout. In this paper, a new fragmentation-aware entanglement routing (FER) algorithm is proposed. With FER, the entangled qubits are shared by all the paths, and the resource contention problem is solved by a priority connection mechanism. Simulation results show that FER consistently outperforms existing algorithms under different network settings.