Quantum Internet Protocol Stack: a Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This paper surveys the unique challenges and necessary paradigm shifts in designing a protocol stack for the emerging Quantum Internet, highlighting its differences from classical Internet architectures.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive survey of the Quantum Internet protocol stack, identifying open problems and emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary efforts.

Findings

Quantum Internet requires a fundamental redesign of the protocol stack.

Classical Internet principles cannot be directly applied to Quantum Internet.

Designing Quantum Internet protocols demands collaboration across physics, engineering, and computer science.

Abstract

Classical Internet evolved exceptionally during the last five decades, from a network comprising a few static nodes in the early days to a leviathan interconnecting billions of devices. This has been possible by the separation of concern principle, for which the network functionalities are organized as a stack of layers, each providing some communication functionalities through specific network protocols. In this survey, we aim at highlighting the impossibility of adapting the classical Internet protocol stack to the Quantum Internet, due to the marvels of quantum mechanics. Indeed, the design of the Quantum Internet requires a major paradigm shift of the whole protocol stack for harnessing the peculiarities of quantum entanglement and quantum information. In this context, we first overview the relevant literature about Quantum Internet protocol stack. Then, stemming from this, we sheds the light on the open problems and required efforts toward the design of an effective and complete Quantum Internet protocol stack. To the best of authors' knowledge, a survey of this type is the first of its own. What emerges from this analysis is that the Quantum Internet, though still in its infancy, is a disruptive technology whose design requires an inter-disciplinary effort at the border between quantum physics, computer and telecommunications engineering.