Decoherence-Aware Entangling and Swapping Strategy Optimization for Entanglement Routing in Quantum Networks

2025-10-16

AI Summary

In quantum networks, environmental decoherence and probabilistic entanglement swapping jointly degrade end-to-end entanglement fidelity, necessitating joint optimization of entanglement generation timing and routing to maximize the total fidelity of accepted requests. To address this, we propose a fine-grained, slot-based scheduling protocol and formulate the problem as TETRIS—Time- and Fidelity-aware Entanglement TRaffIc Scheduling—a novel combinatorial optimization problem. We design two joint optimization algorithms that jointly determine entanglement generation schedules and routing paths while preserving high request acceptance rates. Our approach incorporates an entanglement-aware scheduling mechanism and a precise fidelity evolution model accounting for time-dependent decoherence and swapping success probabilities. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our method improves average end-to-end fidelity by 60%–78% over state-of-the-art baselines; even under low entanglement success probabilities, it consistently achieves gains of 20%–75%.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Quantum teleportation enables high-security communications through end-to-end quantum entangled pairs. End-to-end entangled pairs are created by using swapping processes to consume short entangled pairs and generate long pairs. However, due to environmental interference, entangled pairs decohere over time, resulting in low fidelity. Thus, generating entangled pairs at the right time is crucial. Moreover, the swapping process also causes additional fidelity loss. To this end, this paper presents a short time slot protocol, where a time slot can only accommodate a process. It has a more flexible arrangement of entangling and swapping processes than the traditional long time slot protocol. It raises a new optimization problem TETRIS for finding strategies of entangling and swapping for each request to maximize the fidelity sum of all accepted requests. To solve the TETRIS, we design two novel algorithms with different optimization techniques. Finally, the simulation results manifest that our algorithms can outperform the existing methods by up to 60 ~ 78% in general, and by 20 ~ 75% even under low entangling probabilities.

Problem

• Optimizing entanglement routing to counter quantum decoherence effects
• Maximizing fidelity in quantum networks through strategic swapping processes
• Developing flexible time-slot protocols for efficient entanglement distribution

Innovation

• Short time slot protocol for flexible process arrangement
• Novel algorithms solving TETRIS optimization problem
• Decoherence-aware strategy maximizing entanglement fidelity