Quantum BGP with Online Path Selection via Network Benchmarking

Maoli Liu, Zhuohua Li, Kechao Cai, Jonathan Allcock, Shengyu Zhang, John C. S. Lui

Abstract: Large-scale quantum networks with thousands of nodes require topology-oblivious routing protocols to realize. Most existing quantum network routing protocols only consider the intra-domain scenario, where all nodes belong to a single party with complete topology knowledge. However, like the classical Internet, quantum Internet will likely be provided by multiple quantum Internet Service Providers (qISPs). In this paper, we consider the inter-domain scenario, where the network consists of multiple subnetworks owned by mutually untrusted parties without centralized control. Under this setting, previously proposed quantum entanglement routing policies, which rely on the network topology knowledge, are no longer applicable. We propose a Quantum Border Gateway Protocol (QBGP) for efficiently routing entanglement across qISP boundaries. To guarantee high-quality information transmission, we propose an algorithm named online top-K path selection. This algorithm utilizes the information gain introduced in this paper to adaptively decide on measurement parameters, allowing for the selection of high-fidelity paths and accurate fidelity estimates, while minimizing costs. Additionally, we implement a quantum network simulator and evaluate our protocol and algorithm. Our evaluation shows that QBGP effectively distributes entanglement across different qISPs, and our path selection algorithm increases the network performance by selecting high-fidelity paths with much lower resource consumption than other methods.