Redundant entanglement provisioning and selection for throughput maximization in quantum networks

Quantum communication using qubits based on the principle of entangled photons is a promising solution to improve network security. However, it is difficult to successfully create an entanglement link or connection between two nodes, especially when they are far apart from each other. In addition, only one qubit can be exchanged over an established entanglement connection, resulting in a low throughput.In this paper, we propose Redundant Entanglement Pro-visioning and Selection (REPS) to maximize the throughput for multiple source-destination (SD) pairs in a circuit-switched, multi-hop quantum network. REPS has two distinct features: (i). It provisions backup resources for extra entanglement links between adjacent nodes for failure-tolerance; and (ii). It provides flexibility in selecting successfully created entanglement links to establish entanglement connections for the SD pairs to achieve network-wide optimization. Extensive analysis and simulations show that REPS can achieve optimal routing with a high probability, and improves the throughput by up to 68.35% over the highest-performing algorithms in existence. In addition, it also improves the fairness among the SD pairs in the networks.