Quantum-Aware Network Planning and Integration

Abstract

In order to broaden the adoption of highly-demanded quantum functionalities such as QKD, there is a need for having quantum signals coexist with classical traffic over the same physical medium, typically optical fibers in already-deployed networks. Beyond the experimental point-to-point demonstrations of the past few years, efforts are now underway to integrate QKD at the network level: developing interfaces with the software-defined-network ecosystem; but also network planning tools that satisfy physical-layer contraints jointly on the classical and quantum signals. We have found that in certain situations, naïve network planning prioritizing quantum traffic drastically degrades classical capacity, whereas a quantum-aware wavelength assignment heuristic allows coexistence with minimal impact on both capacities. More such techniques will be required to enable widespread deployment of QKD and other future quantum functionalities.