Routing in Bufferless Quantum Networks
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Quantum memories, which are expensive and often require cryogenic systems, are not yet sufficiently suitable for practical quantum network applications because they cannot provide high efficiency, multimode capacity, and long storage time simultaneously. On the other hand, in networks that do not use quantum memory, a significant decrease in the request success rate (RSR) is observed due to the lack of buffering and synchronization. As a remedy to this problem, we propose an algorithm that enables buffering of qubits by using the network itself as a memory. For this purpose, the approach defined as "network as a memory" partitions the network into several regions. Each region is considered as a virtual node, and instead of a physical quantum memory, the qubits are stored in these virtual nodes by being circulated over the real nodes inside the virtual node. We propose two algorithms, referred to as memory-assisted quantum network (Algorithm A) and network as a memory (Algorithm B): Algorithm A describes the memory-assisted routing approach, while Algorithm B presents the network-as-memory approach. It is demonstrated that Algorithm B, when the parameter (γ) for partitioning the topology into regions is chosen as 1, exhibits higher performance than the case in Algorithm A, where the memory duration (mem) is chosen as 0.1s.
Institution: Technische Universität Dresden
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166526413