PhD Forum: Evaluating and Designing Routing Protocols for Reliable Distributed Quantum Systems

As quantum computers and quantum networks become more capable, it allows for the possibility to use multiple quantum computers as part of a distributed system. Such a distributed system will have applications such as running quantum algorithms in a distributed fashion [7], leadership elections without communication [7], clock synchronisation [10], and a cryptographic protocol called quantum key distribution [1], etc. However, to create a reliable system, it is important that the underlying quantum network can reliably support the necessary communication protocols between quantum nodes. To support reliable communication in a quantum network, quantum routing algorithms - which are algorithms that plan out how to send qubits and over which subset of nodes in the network - is an active area of research. However, various design choices and algorithms exist that are developed without a realistic simulated environment that can provide rich data that can further help develop, improve, and test these algorithms. Such an environment is important because general-purpose algorithms need to take into account detailed information about how the qubit changes over the communication process - as that requirement can vary for different applications - rather than simpler probability based loss models existing algorithms were developed with. Using existing lower-level tools, we are creating a tool will help evaluate and design routing protocol by providing a variety of models - from simple to complex - to support various stages of development, as well as the ability to generate useful data to evaluate how the protocols perform in a realistic quantum network.