Quantum Internet under random breakdowns and intentional attacks

Abstract

Quantum networks will play a key role in distributed quantum information processing. As the network size increases, network-level errors like random breakdown and intentional attack are inevitable; therefore, it is important to understand the robustness of large-scale quantum networks, similar to what has been done for the classical counterpart---the Internet. For exponential networks such as Waxman networks, errors simply re-parameterize the network and lead to a linear decrease of the quantum capacity with the probability of error. The same linear decay happens for scale-free quantum networks under random breakdowns, despite the previously discovered robustness in terms of the connectivity. In presence of attack, however, the capacity of scale-free quantum networks shows a sharp exponential decay with the increasing attack fraction. Our results apply to quantum internet based on fibers for all kinds of quantum communications and provide implications for the future construction of quantum networks with regard to its robustness.

12 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (4)

• The Quantum Internet
• Direct and Reverse Secret-Key Capacities of a Quantum Channel
• Electrical control of a solid-state flying qubit
• Satellite-based photonic quantum networks are small-world

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Advances in Space Quantum Communications
• Complex Quantum Networks: a Topical Review
• Robustness of Noisy Quantum Networks
• Analytical Methods for High-Rate Global Quantum Networks
• End-to-End Capacities of Hybrid Quantum Networks
• Complex quantum network models from spin clusters
• End-to-End Capacities of Imperfect-Repeater Quantum Networks
• Practical Routing and Criticality in Large-Scale Quantum Communication Networks