On the transmission capacity of quantum networks

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.

@article{König2011,
  title     = {On the transmission capacity of quantum networks},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {2},
  number    = {11},
  year      = {2011},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Sandra König and Stefan Rass},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2011.021102},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2011.021102}
}