Article,
On the transmission capacity of quantum networks
International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), (2011)
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.
