Maximizing Entanglement Rates via Efficient Memory Management in Flexible Quantum Switches

Abstract

We study the problem of operating a quantum switch with memory constraints. In particular, the switch has to allocate quantum memories to clients to generate link-level entanglements (LLEs), and then use these to serve end-to-end entanglements requests. The paper’s main contributions are (i) to characterize the switch’s capacity region and study how it scales with respect to the number of quantum memories and probability of successful LLEs and (ii) to propose a memory allocation policy that is throughput optimal. In addition, when the requests are bipartite and the LLE attempts are always successful, we show that the proposed policy has polynomial time complexity. We evaluate the proposed policy numerically and illustrate its performance depending on the requests arrivals characteristics and the time available to obtain a memory allocation.