Synchronization Control-Plane Protocol for Quantum Link Layer
<|reference_start|>Synchronization Control-Plane Protocol for Quantum Link Layer: Heralded entanglement generation between nodes of a future quantum internet is a fundamental operation that unlocks the potential for quantum communication. In this paper, we propose a decentralized synchronization protocol that operates at the classical control-plane of the link layer, to navigate the coordination challenges of generating heralded entanglement across few-qubit quantum network nodes. Additionally, with quantum network simulations using NetSquid, we show that our protocol achieves lower entanglement request latencies than a naive distributed queue approach. We observe a sixfold reduction in average request latency growth as the number of quantum network links increases. The Eventual Synchronization Protocol (ESP) allows nodes to coordinate on heralded entanglement generation in a scalable manner within multi-peer quantum networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first decentralized synchronization protocol for managing heralded entanglement requests.<|reference_end|>
@article{ru2024synchronization,
    title={Synchronization Control-Plane Protocol for Quantum Link Layer},
    author={Brandon Ru, Winston K.G. Seah, Alvin C. Valera},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.07049},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.07049},
    primaryClass={cs.NI}
}