A NOMA-Based Quantum Key Distribution System over Poisson Atmospheric Channels

Quantum wireless communications (QWC) is gaining much attention for its incomparable advantages of secure key transmission in free-space scenarios. In this paper, a novel iterative multi-user quantum key distribution (MQKD) non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) system over Poisson atmospheric channels is proposed. Considering the atmospheric attenuation and quantum direct product operation, a MQKD parallel interference cancellation (PIC) approach is designed at the receiver. In particular, a quantum nonlinear Poisson shot noise limited sum-product interference cancellation algorithm is derived. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is capable of mitigating the multi-user interference effectively, even considering the polarization mismatch. Quantitatively, for the 4-user scenario, it can achieve the classical Bit Error Rate (BER) of 3 x 10-6 at 2.5 km distance with polarization mismatch factor of 0.05. Moreover, the proposed NOMA-MQKD scheme can have obviously higher secure key rate than the conventional WDMA-MQKD approach.