Quantum internet

Abstract

The design of the Quantum Internet protocol stack is at its infancy and early-stage conceptualization. And different heterogeneous proposals are currently available in the literature. The underlying assumption of the existing proposals is that they implicitly mimic classical Internet Protocol design principles: "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there". Hence the network nodes are labeled with classical addresses, constituted by classical bits, and these labels aim at reflecting the node location within the network topology. In this paper, we argue that this twofold assumption of classical and location-aware addressing constitutes a restricting design option, which prevents to scale the quantumness to the network functionalities, beyond simple information encoding/decoding. On the contrary, by embracing quantumness within the node addresses, quantum principles and phenomena could be exploited for enabling a quantum native functioning of the entire communication network. This will unleash the ultimate vision and capabilities of the Quantum Internet.