UAV-Deployed OAM-BB84 QKD: Turbulence- and Misalignment-Resilient Decoy-State Finite-Key Security with AI-Assisted Calibration

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive theoretical and AI-assisted framework for UAV-based quantum key distribution using OAM encoding, addressing turbulence, misalignment, and finite-key effects to enhance security and key rate.

Contribution

It introduces a unified channel model, finite key analysis, and an AI calibration method for resilient UAV-QKD with OAM encoding, improving performance under realistic conditions.

Findings

AI calibration improves secret key rate by 10-30% under turbulence.

The channel model accurately predicts QBER and crosstalk effects.

Finite key analysis ensures security with statistical fluctuations considered.

Abstract

We present a theoretical framework for quantum key distribution (QKD) using orbital angular momentum (OAM) encoded BB84 on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform. A unified channel model captures Kolmogorov turbulence, pointing induced misalignment, and finite aperture clipping, enabling quantitative predictions of inter mode crosstalk and the resulting quantum bit error rate (QBER). Using a weak plus vacuum decoy state formulation, we derive composable finite key lower bounds on the secret key rate that incorporate statistical fluctuations, detector dark counts, efficiency mismatch, and error correction leakage. To stabilize performance under non stationary flight conditions, we introduce a lightweight physics informed learning module that combines physical priors with measured link statistics to classify valid pulses, reject corrupted data, and recommend decoding strategies. We outline a complete evaluation pipeline including UAV system architecture, turbulence driven QBER maps, decoy optimization, finite key scaling, and AI calibration metrics. Simulations indicate that under moderate turbulence and milliradian level pointing jitter, the proposed AI assisted method can improve the secret key rate by 10 percent to 30 percent while preserving composable security.