Software-defined Quantum Communication Systems

Abstract

Quantum communication systems harness modern physics through state-of-the-art optical engineering to provide revolutionary capabilities. An important concern for quantum communication engineering is designing and prototyping these systems to prototype proposed capabilities. We apply the paradigm of software-defined communica- tion for engineering quantum communication systems to facilitate rapid prototyping and prototype comparisons. We detail how to decompose quantum communication terminals into functional layers defining hardware, software, and middleware concerns, and we describe how each layer behaves. Using the super-dense coding protocol as a test case, we describe implementations of both the transmitter and receiver, and we present results from numerical simulations of the behavior. We find that while the theoretical benefits of super dense coding are maintained, there is a classical overhead associated with the full implementation.