The QKD network: model and routing scheme

Abstract

Quantum key distribution (QKD) technology can establish unconditional secure keys between two communicating parties. Although this technology has some inherent constraints, such as the distance and point-to-point mode limits, building a QKD network with multiple point-to-point QKD devices can overcome these constraints. Considering the development level of current technology, the trust relaying QKD network is the first choice to build a practical QKD network. However, the previous research didn’t address a routing method on the trust relaying QKD network in detail. This paper focuses on the routing issues, builds a model of the trust relaying QKD network for easily analysing and understanding this network, and proposes a dynamical routing scheme for this network. From the viewpoint of designing a dynamical routing scheme in classical network, the proposed scheme consists of three components: a Hello protocol helping share the network topology information, a routing algorithm to select a set of suitable paths and establish the routing table and a link state update mechanism helping keep the routing table newly. Experiments and evaluation demonstrates the validity and effectiveness of the proposed routing scheme.