Fair Efficiency Comparisons of Decoy-state Quantum Key Distribution Protocols

TL;DR

This paper provides a fair comparison of decoy-state quantum key distribution protocols by unifying security standards and analyzing the impact of parameters on secure key rates, highlighting improvements and conditions for fair evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework for comparing QKD protocols under different security standards and analyzes factors affecting secure key rates.

Findings

Unified quantification of protocols under different security standards.

Impact of sending length and secure parameters on key rate.

Conditions for fair comparison between protocols.

Abstract

Secure key rate of decoy-state quantum key distribution protocols has been improved with biased basis choice, however, the security standards and parameters of current protocols are different. As a result, we cannot give an accurate key rate comparison between different kinds of protocols. Taking the schemes based on different formula of secure key rate as examples, we give a fair comparison between typical protocols under universal composable security standard. Through analyzing the relationship of security parameters in post-processing stage and final secure key, we achieve the unified quantification between protocols based on Gottesman-Lo-Lutkenhaus-Preskill formula and the ones under universal composable security. Based on the above research, the impact of different sending length and secure parameters on secure key rate is investigated, meanwhile, we give the dependent relationship between secure key rate and sending length under different secure parameters. Besides, we analyze the importance and conditions of fair comparison. For the first time we give a fair comparison between the protocols based on GLLP formula and smooth entropy, and taking Raymond protocol and Toshiba protocol as examples, we analyze the way for improving secure key rate in the light intensity choice and the single bit error rate estimation method.