Hierarchical simultaneous entanglement swapping for multi-hop quantum communication based on multi-particle entangled states* *Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61971348), the Scientific Research Program Funded by Shaanxi Provincial Education Department, China (Grant No. 16JK1711), and the Natural Science Foundation Research Project of Shaanxi Province, China (Grant No. 2016JQ6033).

Abstract

Entanglement swapping is a key technology for multi-hop communication based on entanglement in quantum networks. However, the end-to-end delay of the traditional sequential entanglement swapping (SEQES) grows rapidly with the increase of network scale. To solve this problem, we first propose a low-delay multi-particle simultaneous entanglement swapping (SES) scheme to establish the remote four-particle Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) channel states for the bidirectional teleportation of three-particle GHZ states, in which the intermediate nodes perform Bell state measurements, send the measurement results and the Bell state type to the user node Bob (or Alice) through classical channel simultaneously. Bob (or Alice) only needs to carry out a proper unitary operation according to the information he (or she) has received. Further, we put forward a hierarchical simultaneous entanglement swapping (HSES) scheme to reduce the classical information transmission cost, which is composed of level-1 SES and level-2 SES (schemes). The former is an inner segment SES, and the latter is an inter segments SES. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show the HSES can obtain the optimal performance tradeoff between end-to-end delay and classical cost.