Quantum entanglement swapping can be used to establish reliable quantum remote transmission channel so as to realize transmission of quantum states. However, the highly stable quantum network is required in the quantum channels when using quantum entanglement swapping, otherwise it will waste a lot of entanglement resources. In order to save entanglement resources, we have to put forward a kind of quantum communication network transmission protocol based on packet switching, according to the theory of quantum teleportation. Firstly, the principle of packet switching in computer network is introduced. Next we describe the implementation process of quantum network transmission protocols which are based on entanglement swapping and packet switching. We then analyze the reliability, security and utilization rate of entanglement of the protocol we have proposed. And after that the quantitative relationship about the number of entanglement quantum states, the number of routers and link error rates are calculated. Finally, we compare these two transmission protocols. Simulation results show that the number of entanglement for these two protocols is equal without consideration of the link errors. When taking them into account, the packet switching transmission protocol can save numbers of entanglement resources obviously. In addition, with the increase of number of routers and the rise in link error rates, the quantum communication network transmission protocol based on packet switching will need less entanglement resources than that based on entanglement swapping. Therefore, when the quantum transmission network is not stable, the packet switching transmission protocol has a better transmission performance, and it can be applied to the future construction of quantum network.

By using quantum packet transmission technology in large scale quantum communication networks, the throughput of transmission node, network link utilization, and the anti-interference performance of communication can be effectively improved. However, the fast transmission of quantum packets is closely related to the performance of router. The bottleneck of the router performance will seriously affect the scalability of the network and the transmission efficiency of the link. In order to reduce the number of quantum packet queues in nodes of the quantum communication network and to reduce the transmission delay of quantum packets, firstly, according to the classical computer communication network structure, in our paper, we divide the quantum communication network into quantum local area network, quantum metropolitan area network and quantum wide area network. Secondly, the quantum packet format and the quantum cluster format compatible with the packet format in the computer network are determined. Then, a quantum information packet transmission scheme based on the hierarchy is proposed, to realize the end-to-end transmission of quantum information. In our scheme, the quantum packets are divided into quantum packet header information and quantum data information. Quantum dense coding mode is used to transmit the quantum packet header information, while the quantum data information uses quantum teleportation to transmit. First, the quantum packets are sent to the router of the quantum local area network at source address, then the quantum LAN router relay the packets to the quantum metropolitan area network router, the router here makes the quantum packets into quantum cluster according to destination address. Quantum clusters are transmitted in the quantum metropolitan area network and quantum wide area network, ending in the quantum metropolitan area network routing. After the quantum clusters are decomposed, they are sent to the destination address through the local area network router of each quantum packet.We analyze the number of quantum entanglement pairs and the total transmission time in our scheme. The results show that the more the routers by the quantum packet and the quantum cluster are, the more the number of quantum entanglement pairs required by the transmission of a certain quantum packet is. When the number of routers is certain, the number of entanglement pairs required in the transmission process of quantum packet and quantum cluster depends on the number of quantum packets. Finally, the theoretical analysis and calculation are carried out by Matlab simulation, the results show that hierarchical quantum packet information transmission scheme can effectively reduce the transmission time of quantum packet information in the quantum communication network, and the reduced time is related to the quantum router performance and the number of quantum packets to send: the more the number of quantum packets to send, the longer the length of packet processing time needs is and the more obvious the advantage of our scheme is. Therefore, the proposed scheme in this paper is suitable for the construction of large scale quantum communication networks.