QLinkLayer simulation implementation

This repo contains the implementation of the link layer protocol used for simulations in the paper: A Link Layer Protocol for Quantum Networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.09778)

The data collected for the above paper using the code in this repo can be found at: https://dataverse.nl/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:10411/RA1RRK&version=DRAFT

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Running the simulations

The simulation backend used for these simulations is our purpose-built discrete-event simulator NetSQUID. NetSQUID is currently under development and is not yet freely available. For this reason you cannot run the simulation without getting access to NetSQUID. However you can still take a look at the actual implementation of the protocol.

Requirements:

• netsquid v4.0.2
• simulaqron v1.3
• easysquid 547555a2584eb83e7a59dc501ccdfe4071939bb2

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Notes

• The fidelity estimation unit used in these simulations was very simplistic and therefore not correct. It did not do any estimation based on measurement outcomes but only using a simple model for what the generated states are based on bright state populations, detection efficiencies and dark counts, not taking gate and measurement noise into account.

• The simulation we ran used a rather pessimistic coherence time for the electron (T1=2.68 ms, T2=1 ms) and nuclear spin (T1=inf, T2=3.5 ms), whereas coherence times of seconds have been experimentally verified using dynamical decoupling.

• Only one of the carbons (nr 1) was used, so whenever an type K OK was returned to the higher layer it was consumed and measured to be used again. Thus multiple entangled pairs were never stored at the same time.

• During the earlier of these simulations we noticed a bug with the distributed queue in some rare cases, which amounted to some warnings in the logs. This is however now fixed in the latest version of the repo.

• To more efficiently estimate QBER, the measurement-bases used for type M requests were iterated over (X, Y, Z) between the nodes such that the two nodes always measured in the same basis. The nodes choose the measurement-basis based on the current MHP-cycle modulo 3. However, this is not what a real implementation of a link layer protocol would do, see specification of the fields RBC, ROTX1, ROTY and ROTX2 in the CREATE header specified in https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dahlberg-ll-quantum/

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Files

The entanglement generation protocol (EGP) constist of the following files:

• qlinklayer/distQueue.py: Implementation of the distributed queue used by the EGP.
• qlinklayer/egp.py: The main file for the protocol. API to higher layers is given as the method qlinklayer.egp.NodeCentricEGP.create.
• qlinklayer/feu.py: A naive (and incorrect) implementation of the fidelity estimation unit used by the EGP to provide estimation of fidelities of the generated states.
• qlinklayer/localQueue.py: Describing each local queue at the nodes which the distributed queue makes sure are synchronized.
• qlinklayer/qmm.py: The quantum memory manager used by the EGP to allocate qubits used for entanglement generation.
• qlinklayer/scheduler.py: A scheduler used to scheduler incoming requests from higher layers for entanglement generation.

Other file:

• qlinklayer/datacollection.py: Defines how data should be collected during simulations (e.g. collect states, errors etc.)
• qlinklayer/mhp.py: A simulated version of the middle-heralded-protocol (MHP) which is the protocol in the physical layer which the EGP communicates with.
• qlinklayer/scenario.py and qlinklayer/specific_scenarious.py: Acts as higher layers during the simulations and issues entanglement generation requests (CREATE) to the EGP.

The folder qlinklayer/simulations/ contains all files that were used to setup the simulations for the paper.