Quantum Internet: A Revolutionary Disruption

In the wake of unprecedented technological disruptions witnessed in the recent past, “quantum internet” has emerged as a promising candidate which has a potential to revolutionize both the existing wired and wireless communications. Quantum internet is basically a network of quantum devices that operates within an environment that harnesses the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics, namely superposition and entanglement. Unfortunately, however, the constituent quantum processing nodes as well as the transmission media are susceptible to noise, which is a major impediment to the realization of a global quantum Internet. Quantum error correction (QEC) is a set of techniques to protect quantum states from the effects of environmental noise, or de-coherence, and are thus envisaged to be very promising for future Quantum internet. Aikin to the classical internet, Quantum internet is envisaged to have following building blocks: quantum processors, quantum channel, quantum switch, quantum router and quantum repeater. However, considering the quantum mechanical constraints, different network hardware and software design solutions are essentially required. Typical hardware includes: quantum information source, repeaters, quantum memories and quantum detectors; which are predominantly optical/photonic devices and systems. Hence photonic technology is likely to be the key technology for the future quantum internet. In this paper, after describing the basic quantum mechanical principles on which the quantum computing and quantum internet is based, we conduct an intensive study of the major building blocks of a quantum internet and enumerate some critical challenges. Next, we highlight their strengths and weaknesses and some technological challenges. In the end we discuss some future research directions.