Asymmetric adaptive LDPC-based information reconciliation for industrial quantum key distribution

TL;DR

This paper introduces an asymmetric LDPC-based information reconciliation method that adapts to channel conditions, significantly improving throughput and efficiency for practical quantum key distribution systems with resource constraints.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel asymmetric LDPC-based reconciliation scheme combining error estimation and rate adaptation, enhancing performance in industrial QKD settings.

Findings

Achieves higher throughput compared to symmetric schemes

Provides secret key rates close to symmetric methods across various error rates

Efficient for high key rate applications with limited classical channel capacity

Abstract

We develop a new approach for asymmetric LDPC-based information reconciliation in order to adapt to the current channel state and achieve better performance and scalability in practical resource-constrained QKD systems. The new scheme combines the advantages of LDPC codes, a priori error rate estimation, rate-adaptive and blind information reconciliation techniques. We compare the performance of several asymmetric and symmetric error correction schemes using real industrial QKD setup. The proposed asymmetric algorithm achieves significantly higher throughput, providing a secret key rate very close to the symmetric one in a wide range of error rates. Thus, our approach turns out to be particularly efficient for applications with high key rates, limited classical channel capacity and asymmetric computational resource allocation.