Generalized Kennedy Receivers Enhanced CV-QKD in Turbulent Channels for Endogenous Security of Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network

TL;DR

This paper enhances CV-QKD in turbulent channels using a generalized Kennedy receiver, improving detection performance and secret key rate, thereby strengthening endogenous security in space-air-ground networks.

Contribution

It introduces a CD-Kennedy receiver with EGC for CV-QKD, deriving SKR formulas and demonstrating superior performance over homodyne detection in turbulent conditions.

Findings

CD-Kennedy receiver outperforms homodyne in BER and SKR

SKR of CD-Kennedy is more robust in turbulence

Different system settings are needed for communication and key distribution

Abstract

Endogenous security in next-generation wireless communication systems attracts increasing attentions in recent years. A typical solution to endogenous security problems is the quantum key distribution (QKD), where unconditional security can be achieved thanks to the inherent properties of quantum mechanics. Continuous variable-quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) enjoys high secret key rate (SKR) and good compatibility with existing optical communication infrastructure. Traditional CV-QKD usually employ coherent receivers to detect coherent states, whose detection performance is restricted to the standard quantum limit. In this paper, we employ a generalized Kennedy receiver called CD-Kennedy receiver to enhance the detection performance of coherent states in turbulent channels, where equal-gain combining (EGC) method is used to combine the output of CD-Kennedy receivers. Besides, we derive the SKR of a post-selection based CV-QKD protocol using both CD-Kennedy receiver and homodyne receiver with EGC in turbulent channels. We further propose an equivalent transmittance method to facilitate the calculation of both the bit-error rate (BER) and SKR. Numerical results show that the CD-Kennedy receiver can outperform the homodyne receiver in turbulent channels in terms of both BER and SKR performance. We find that BER and SKR performance advantage of CD-Kennedy receiver over homodyne receiver demonstrate opposite trends as the average transmittance increases, which indicates that two separate system settings should be employed for communication and key distribution purposes. Besides, we also demonstrate that the SKR performance of a CD-Kennedy receiver is much robust than that of a homodyne receiver in turbulent channels.