Quantum Internet under random breakdowns and intentional attacks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the robustness of large-scale quantum networks against random failures and targeted attacks, revealing linear capacity decay under random errors and exponential decay under attacks, informing future quantum internet design.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of quantum network robustness, highlighting differences in capacity decay under various failure models, which was previously unexplored.

Findings

Quantum capacity decreases linearly with random breakdown probability.

Scale-free quantum networks are robust to random failures but vulnerable to attacks.

Capacity decays exponentially under intentional attacks.

Abstract

Quantum networks will play a key role in distributed quantum information processing. As the network size increases, network-level errors like random breakdown and intentional attack are inevitable; therefore, it is important to understand the robustness of large-scale quantum networks, similar to what has been done for the classical counterpart---the Internet. For exponential networks such as Waxman networks, errors simply re-parameterize the network and lead to a linear decrease of the quantum capacity with the probability of error. The same linear decay happens for scale-free quantum networks under random breakdowns, despite the previously discovered robustness in terms of the connectivity. In presence of attack, however, the capacity of scale-free quantum networks shows a sharp exponential decay with the increasing attack fraction. Our results apply to quantum internet based on fibers for all kinds of quantum communications and provide implications for the future construction of quantum networks with regard to its robustness.