Energetic Analysis of Emerging Quantum Communication Protocols

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework to model and benchmark the energy consumption of emerging quantum communication protocols, providing tools for assessing their sustainability in future quantum networks.

Contribution

It introduces a foundational framework and open-source software for estimating energy use in quantum communication protocols, addressing a key challenge in quantum network deployment.

Findings

Benchmark results for bipartite and multipartite protocols

Discussion of figures of merit for energy evaluation

Open-source software for energy estimation

Abstract

With the rapid development and early industrialization of quantum technologies, it is of great interest to analyze their overall energy consumption before planning for their wide-scale deployments. The evaluation of the total energy requirements of quantum networks is a challenging task: different networks require very disparate techniques to create, distribute, manipulate, detect, and process quantum signals. This paper aims to lay the foundations of a framework to model the energy requirements of different quantum technologies and protocols applied to near-term quantum networks. Different figures of merit are discussed and a benchmark on the energy consumption of bipartite and multipartite network protocols is presented. An open-source software to estimate the energy consumption of photonic setups is also provided.