Routing in a quantum network

It is now well known that quantum physics offers novel ways for information communication. It is expected that these principles will lead to a quantum enabled internet supporting new communication, computation and metrologocial tasks. Given the global nature of such an internet, it is clear that quantum repeaters will play an essential role in both its development and abilities. As such the efficient routing of quantum (and classical) signals will be paramount.

We discuss how the different repeater generations naturally require different routing approaches: the lower ones favoring a circuit switched approach with static routing while the third generation are ideal for a packet switched approach with dynamic routing. We illustrate how dynamic routing significantly boosts the networks performance especially when multiple users want to communicate simultaneously while allowing multiple simultaneous routes to be used by a single user. It is important to characterize the performance of the various approaches and so we introduce various cost metrics associated with the resources used within the repeaters nodes to normalize our communication rates by. Our results show the performance of the network heavily depends on efficient classical communication and the network associated with that.