Fast and Secure Routing Algorithms for Quantum Key Distribution Networks

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 31; no. 5; pp. 1 - 16
• Main Authors: Akhtar, Md Shahbaz, G, Krishnakumar, B, Vishnu, Sinha, Abhishek
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-10-2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Availability; Computer architecture; Cryptography; Data models; Encryption; network optimization; Optimization; Quantum cryptography; Quantum entanglement; Quantum key distribution; Queueing; Routing; Stability analysis; throughput-optimal routing; Unicast
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2023.3246114

We investigate the problem of fast and secure packet routing in multi-hop Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) networks. We consider a practical trusted-node setup where a QKD protocol randomly generates symmetric private key pairs over each QKD-enabled link in a network. Packets are first encrypted with the available quantum keys and then transmitted on a point-to-point basis. A fundamental problem in this setting is the design of a secure and capacity-achieving routing policy that takes into account the time-varying availability of the encryption keys and diverse physical-layer link capacities. To address this problem, we propose a new secure throughput-optimal policy called Tandem Queue Decomposition (TQD). The TQD policy is designed by incorporating the QKD process into the Universal Max Weight (UMW) routing policy. We show that the TQD policy achieves the entire secure capacity region for a broad class of traffic, including unicast, broadcast, multicast, and anycast. The TQD policy operates by reducing the problem to the generalized network flow problem without the key availability constraints over a transformed network. The throughput-optimality of the TQD policy is established using the Lyapunov stability theory by carefully analyzing the interdependent queueing process and the key-storage dynamics. Finally, we demonstrate the practical efficiency of the TQD policy over the existing routing algorithms by numerically comparing their performance on a realistic simulator built on top of the state-of-the-art OMNeT++ network simulator platform.