Experimental Simulation of Two Pulses and Three Pulses Coherent One Way Quantum Key Distribution Protocol in Noisy/Noiseless and Wired/Wireless Environment

TL;DR

This paper simulates and compares two and three pulses Coherent One Way Quantum Key Distribution protocols in various environments and weather conditions to evaluate their practical implementation and robustness.

Contribution

It implements and compares two variants of the COW QKD protocol in noisy/noiseless and wired/wireless settings using simulation.

Findings

Protocols maintain integrity under different weather conditions.

Three pulses COW protocol shows improved resilience.

Simulation results guide practical deployment of QKD protocols.

Abstract

Due to the rapid advancement of quantum technology, the traditional established classical cryptographic protocols are no longer secure. To make the world quantum safe, different quantum protocols have been taken into account. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols are one of them where two legitimate parties can securely communicate by upholding the quantum principles. Out of various QKD protocols, Coherent One Way (COW) protocol is one of the most famous protocol because of its ease of hardware deployment, and resilience nature towards PNS attack. In this initiative, we have implemented the original version of two pulses COW QKD protocol and a very recent variant of it, three pulses COW (Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 064053 Published 19 December 2022), in Optisystem v21.1. We demonstrate the encoding as well as decoding portions of the protocols under both noisy and noiseless scenario considering different weather conditions. Finally, we report a comparative study amongst the protocols under wired (optical fibre) and wireless (free space) environments to check the proper integrity of transmission. The simulation results provide us an overview regarding the practical implementation of the protocols under different weather conditions.