Joint Communication and Sensing with Bipartite Entanglement over Bosonic Channels

TL;DR

This paper explores how entanglement can be used to enhance joint communication and sensing over bosonic channels, revealing trade-offs and quantum advantages in a quantum network context.

Contribution

It provides a novel characterization of the trade-offs between communication and sensing using entanglement in bosonic channels, demonstrating quantum advantage over classical methods.

Findings

Achievable rate/error-exponent region characterized for joint tasks.

Entanglement-assisted methods outperform time-sharing strategies.

Quantum advantage demonstrated in the trade-off analysis.

Abstract

We consider a joint communication and sensing problem over an optical link in which a low-power transmitter simultaneously communicates with a receiver and identifies the range of a defect producing a backscattered signal. We model the system as a lossy thermal-noise bosonic channel, in which the target location, modeled as a beamsplitter, affects the timing of the backscattered signal. Motivated by the envisioned deployment of entanglement-enabled quantum networks, we allow the transmitter to exploit shared entanglement to assist both sensing and communication. Since entanglement is known to enhance sensing, as demonstrated in Quantum Illumination (QI), and to increase communication rates through entanglement-assisted communication, the transmitter faces a trade-off in allocating its entanglement resources between the two tasks. Our main result is a characterization of these trade-offs in the form of an achievable rate/error-exponent region, which can outperform time-sharing and demonstrates a quantum advantage.