REDP: Reliable Entanglement Distribution Protocol Design for Large-Scale Quantum Networks

Remote entanglement distribution in an efficient and reliable manner, especially in the context of a large-scale quantum network with multiple requests, remains an unsolved challenge. The key difficulties lie in achieving spontaneous and precise control over the entanglement distribution procedure, as multiple nodes need to reach a consensus on how to perform it. From the network aspect, allocating link-layer entangled pairs as resources to achieve high efficiency is also challenging. To address these issues, we propose a decentralized Reliable Entanglement Distribution Protocol (REDP) for large-scale networks. The protocol operates in a Forward-Backward Propagation (FBP) manner, where consensus is reached hop-by-hop and disseminated to all nodes on the path. We further use probabilistic analysis and quasi-static modeling to seek the fairness and efficiency of the network based on the above transmission model. Accordingly, we introduce a Source Window Strategy (SWS) and an Entanglement Allocation Strategy (EAS) to assign sending windows and allocate resources for multiple requests, ensuring a high level of fairness and efficiency from a network perspective. Through systematic simulations involving both classical and quantum communication protocols, we demonstrate that REDP outperforms existing approaches in terms of fairness, throughput, and fidelity performance.