Abstract
Recently, quantum computing and communications rapidly developed to interconnect heterogeneous quantum devices. In particular, some researchers have been performed about terrestrial quantum communications over typical optical fiber links. However, this technology is affected by extremely high losses that can be faced only through the deployment of several repeaters, which in turn involve impractical costs for end-to-end (E2E) route management. Quantum Satellite Networks (QSNs) can overcome the limitations of terrestrial optical networks, such as a remarkable signal attenuation over long distances and difficulty of intercontinental communications. The recent studies on quantum satellite communications motivated our research towards a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) quantum satellite backbone for interconnecting quantum on Earth Servers in order to achieve an unprecedented computational capacity. Specifically, our paper proposes a near optimum E2E path evaluation procedure allowing an efficient switching in order to maximize the entanglement generation rate. Indeed, this is one of the main issues that involve the Data Link Layer and the Network Layer of the Quantum Internet (QI) protocol stack, which is in its early standardization phase. In particular, the design of our approach is based on the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm with the aim of minimizing the number of hops for E2E connection and maximizing network capacity. Therefore, we compare distributed and centralized approaches in order to achieve a trade-off between performance and cost.
Highlights
A N impressive progress has been made recently in the making of Quantum Computing (QC), up to the realization of 53 qubit processing devices, as explained in [1]
It is possible to make a comparison between classical and quantum networks considering that a network of quantum nodes which is linked by classical channels and comprises k nodes each with n quantum bits has a state space of dimension k2n, whereas a fully quantum network has an exponentially larger state space, that is 2kn
New Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations like OneWeb, Telesat, and Starlink quoted in [40] are going to be launched in the near future, but the dataset we considered is the one related to the constellation IRIDIUM made up of 75 satellites, 66 cross-linked satellites and 9 in-orbit spares operating in a LEO, at an altitude of 800 km [41]
Summary
A N impressive progress has been made recently in the making of Quantum Computing (QC), up to the realization of 53 qubit processing devices, as explained in [1]. In contrast to classic repeaters, QRs can not clone quantum signals This peculiarity depends on the no-cloning theorem and the uncertainty principle, which are the physical laws making quantum communications absolutely secure [8]. These devices are equipped with quantum memories, which generate the entanglement between adjacent nodes via the transmission of photons entangled with their memories.
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