Quantum communications is a promising technology that will play a fundamental role in the design of future networks. In fact, significant efforts are being dedicated by both the quantum physics and the classical communications communities on developing new architectures, solutions, and practical implementations of quantum communication networks (QCNs). Although these efforts led to various advances in today's technologies, there still exists a non-trivial gap between the research efforts of the two communities on designing and optimizing the performance of QCNs. For instance, most prior works by the classical communications community ignore important quantum physics-based constraints when designing QCNs. For example, many existing works on entanglement distribution do not account for the decoherence of qubits inside quantum memories and, thus, their designs become impractical since they assume an infinite lifetime of quantum states. In this paper, we bring forth a novel analysis of the performance of QCNs in a physics-informed manner, by relying on the quantum physics principles that underly the different components of QCNs. The need of the physics-informed approach is then assessed and its fundamental role in designing practical QCNs is analyzed across various open research areas. Moreover, we identify novel physics-informed performance metrics and controls that enable QCNs to leverage the state-of-the-art advancements in quantum technologies to enhance their performance. Finally, we analyze multiple pressing challenges and open research directions in QCNs that must be treated using a physics-informed approach to lead practically viable results. Ultimately, this work attempts to bridge the gap between the classical communications and the quantum physics communities in the area of QCNs to foster the development of the future communication networks towards the quantum Internet.
翻译:量子通信是一种大有希望的技术,在设计未来网络方面将发挥根本性作用,事实上,量子物理和古典通信界正在做出重大努力,开发量子通信网络的新架构、解决方案和实际实施。尽管这些努力导致了当今技术的各种进步,但两个社区在设计和优化质子网络绩效方面的研究工作之间仍然存在着非三重差距。例如,古典通信界以往的多数工作在设计QCN时忽视重要的量子物理量子限制。例如,许多关于纠结分布的现有工作没有考虑到量子通信网络在量子记忆中脱钩的情况,因此,其设计变得不切实际。尽管这些努力导致当今技术在当今技术上取得了各种进步,但在本文中,我们通过依赖量子物理物理学原则(在QCN的不同组成部分下),对量子通信方法的需要进行了评估,并在设计实际的量子物理物理网络分配方面的基本作用,并没有考虑到量子通信界在量子网络中的分界线。最后,我们通过对各种研究领域的前期性能进行分析,我们必须在各种研究领域进行量子物理分析,我们最终将基础的进度分析,我们从各种研究领域推进了这些进展。