On the transmission capacity of quantum networks

Abstract

Abstract-We provide various results about the transmission capacity of quantum networks. Our primary focus is on algorithmic methods to efficiently compute upper-bounds to the traffic that the network can handle at most, and to compute lower-bounds on the likelihood that a customer has to wait for service due to network congestion. This establishes analogous assertions as derived from Erlang B or Erlang C models for standard telecommunications. Our proposed methods, while specifically designed for quantum networks, do neither hinge on a particular quantum key distribution technology nor on any particular routing scheme. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using a worked example. Moreover, we explicitly consider two different architectures for quantum key management, one of which employs individual key-buffers for each relay connection, the other using a shared key-buffer for every transmission. We devise specific methods for analyzing the network performance depending on the chosen key-buffer architecture, and our experiments led to quite different results for the two variants.

Tackling Denial of Service Attacks on Key Management in Software-Defined Quantum Key Distribution Networks

“…Each node in a QKD network based on trust-relay paradigm performs routing and forwarding operations [5], [7]. As a result, the organization of these networks was seen as distributed, with no hierarchical parent node.…”