Quantum Game Theory Meets Quantum Networks

Classical game theory is a powerful tool focusing on optimized resource distribution, allocation, and sharing in classical wired and wireless networks. As quantum networks are emerging as a means of providing true connectivity between quantum computers, it is imperative and crucial to exploit game theory for addressing challenges such as entanglement distribution and access, routing, topology extraction, and inference. Quantum networks provide the promising opportunity of employing quantum games owing to their inherent capability of generating and sharing quantum states. In addition, quantum games offer enhanced payoffs and winning probabilities, new strategies, and equilibria, which are unimaginable in classical games. Employing quantum game theory to solve fundamental challenges in quantum networks opens a new fundamental research direction necessitating inter-disciplinary efforts. In this article, we introduce a novel game-the-oretical framework for exploiting quantum strategies to solve – as an archetypal example – one of the key functionalities of a quantum network, namely, entanglement distribution. We compare quantum strategies with classical ones by showing the quantum advantages in terms of link fidelity improvement and latency decrease in communication. In the future, we will generalize our game framework to optimize entanglement distribution and access over any quantum network topology. We will also explore how quantum games can be leveraged to address other challenges like routing, optimization of quantum operations, and topology design.