Architecture, security and topology of a global Quantum Key Distribution network

The performances of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) systems have notably progressed since the early experimental demonstrations and several recent works indicate that the pace of this progression is very likely to be maintained -if not increased- in the future years. In parallel to this fast progression of QKD techniques, commercial products are also being developed, making QKD deployment for securization of some specific “real” data networks more and more likely to occur. It is the goal to the European project Secoqc to deploy a secure long-distance network based on quantum cryptography. It implies the conception of a specific architecture able to connect multiple users that may possibly be very far away from each other while QKD links are currently ″point-to-point only″and intrinsically limited in distance.