QuIP: A P4 Quantum Internet Protocol Prototyping Framework

TL;DR

QuIP is a flexible, platform-agnostic framework for designing and prototyping quantum network protocols using P4, facilitating interoperability and simulation across different quantum network simulators.

Contribution

It introduces QuIP, a novel P4-based framework that standardizes quantum network protocol development and enables simulation in existing tools, addressing interoperability issues.

Findings

Successfully implemented a new device architecture, V1Quantum.

Demonstrated protocol implementation and simulation in NetSquid.

Enhanced reusability and interoperability of quantum network protocols.

Abstract

Quantum entanglement is so fundamentally different from a network packet that several quantum network stacks have been proposed; one of which has even been experimentally demonstrated. Several simulators have also been developed to make up for limited hardware availability, and which facilitate the design and evaluation of quantum network protocols. However, the lack of shared tooling and community-agreed node architectures has resulted in protocol implementations that are tightly coupled to their simulators. Besides limiting their reusability between different simulators, it also makes building upon prior results and simulations difficult. To address this problem, we have developed QuIP: a P4-based Quantum Internet Protocol prototyping framework for quantum network protocol design. QuIP is a framework for designing and implementing quantum network protocols in a platform-agnostic fashion. It achieves this by providing the means to flexibly, but rigorously, define device architectures against which quantum network protocols can be implemented in the network programming language P4$_{16}$. QuIP also comes with the necessary tooling to enable their execution in existing quantum network simulators. We demonstrate its use by showcasing V1Quantum, a completely new device architecture, implementing a link- and network-layer protocol, and simulating it in the existing simulator NetSquid.