Entanglement-Enhanced Communication Networks
Janis Nötzel, Stephen DiAdamo · 2020
Building quantum networks ultimately requires strong use cases. As today's design and use of the Internet solely rests on the interconnection of classical computing devices, the development of hardware should take this dependence on an existing market into account. One might think quantum secure communication would be such a use case, but the entire design of the current Internet is built on the end-to-end argument and may reject the idea of implementing security as a physical layer protocol. On the other hand, higher data rates and reduced latency have been successfully used as key arguments for the conception of new communication standards. We thus argue that exactly these two figures of merit should be used again. We define two new initial stages of development of the quantum Internet, where in the first phase entanglement is only generated and used between network nodes, and in second phase entanglement swapping and thus distribution of entanglement over increasing distances becomes possible. In both phases, we show by simulation how the available new protocols increase the network capacity. Interestingly, following this envisioned approach can serve the needs of current market participants while paving the road for fully quantum applications in the future.