Age-Based Scheduling for a Memory-Constrained Quantum Switch

2026-01-16

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of limited quantum memory, low entanglement link success rates, and decoherence in scheduling multi-user entanglement requests within quantum switches. Focusing on time-slotted systems, the paper introduces a novel performance metric termed "Age of Entanglement Establishment" (AoEE). Building upon probabilistic link generation, entanglement swapping, and a single-slot decoherence model, the authors develop two families of low-complexity scheduling policies with analytically tractable performance, along with a third policy that offers provable performance guarantees. Closed-form expressions for AoEE are derived through rigorous analytical methods, and extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed strategies consistently achieve both theoretical rigor and practical superiority across a wide range of system parameters.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

In a time-slotted system, we study the problem of scheduling multipartite entanglement requests in a quantum switch with a finite number of quantum memory registers. Specifically, we consider probabilistic link-level entanglement (LLE) generation for each user, probabilistic entanglement swapping, and one-slot decoherence. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheduling policies, we introduce a novel age-based metric, coined age of entanglement establishment (AoEE). We consider two families of low-complexity policies for which we obtain closed-form expressions for their corresponding AoEE performance. Optimizing over each family, we obtain two policies. Further, we propose one more low-complexity policy and provide its performance guarantee. Finally, we numerically compare the performance of the proposed policies.

Problem

• quantum switch
• entanglement scheduling
• quantum memory
• age of entanglement
• time-slotted system

Innovation

• age of entanglement establishment
• quantum switch scheduling
• memory-constrained quantum network
• entanglement swapping
• low-complexity policy