TY - JOUR
T1 - Efficient and Flexible Multi-Qubit Entanglement Transmission in Quantum Networks
AU - Gao, Yanan
AU - Yang, Song
AU - Li, Fan
AU - Li, Youqi
AU - Zhu, Liehuang
AU - Trajanovski, Stojan
AU - Fu, Xiaoming
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 IEEE.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - The unprecedented advancements in quantum technology have opened new prospects for the widespread adoption of quantum applications, placing new demands on the information transmission capabilities of large-scale quantum networks. Long-distance and stable entanglements are deemed as the lifeline in quantum network communication. However, some weaknesses, e.g., quantum decoherence, scarce quantum memory, and uneven-quality entanglement, of the quantum entanglement hinder the development. In this paper, we propose Sophon, an online transmission framework for quantum networks, which utilizes high-dimensional entanglements to concurrently transmit multi-qubit data to satisfy the transmission requirements of the real-time request set. We first model the quantum network with multi-qubit entanglement represented by W quantum state and then formulate the Entanglement Routing and Qubit Provisioning (ERQP) problem as a global-local optimization process. To solve the ERQP problem, we distributedly regard each network node as an RL agent for resource provisioning and extend the step-updating of the Markov Decision Process by introducing a centralized controller for entanglement route selection to optimize local and global objectives, respectively. Extensive simulations demonstrate, on the self-made simulation platform, Sophon achieves a 21.89%-66.52% decrease in the communication cost, and is more robust on different scales of the network topology and the request set than the baselines.
AB - The unprecedented advancements in quantum technology have opened new prospects for the widespread adoption of quantum applications, placing new demands on the information transmission capabilities of large-scale quantum networks. Long-distance and stable entanglements are deemed as the lifeline in quantum network communication. However, some weaknesses, e.g., quantum decoherence, scarce quantum memory, and uneven-quality entanglement, of the quantum entanglement hinder the development. In this paper, we propose Sophon, an online transmission framework for quantum networks, which utilizes high-dimensional entanglements to concurrently transmit multi-qubit data to satisfy the transmission requirements of the real-time request set. We first model the quantum network with multi-qubit entanglement represented by W quantum state and then formulate the Entanglement Routing and Qubit Provisioning (ERQP) problem as a global-local optimization process. To solve the ERQP problem, we distributedly regard each network node as an RL agent for resource provisioning and extend the step-updating of the Markov Decision Process by introducing a centralized controller for entanglement route selection to optimize local and global objectives, respectively. Extensive simulations demonstrate, on the self-made simulation platform, Sophon achieves a 21.89%-66.52% decrease in the communication cost, and is more robust on different scales of the network topology and the request set than the baselines.
KW - Quantum networks
KW - branch-and-bound
KW - multi-agent reinforcement learning
KW - multi-qubit entanglement
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105022256901
U2 - 10.1109/TON.2025.3631515
DO - 10.1109/TON.2025.3631515
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105022256901
SN - 2998-4157
VL - 34
SP - 1761
EP - 1776
JO - IEEE Transactions on Networking
JF - IEEE Transactions on Networking
ER -