Communication Over Entanglement-Breaking Channels With Unreliable Entanglement Assistance

Abstract: Entanglement assistance can improve communication rates significantly. Yet, its generation is susceptible to failure. The unreliable assistance model accounts for those challenges. Previous work provided an asymptotic formula that outlines the tradeoff between the unassisted and excess rates from entanglement assistance. We derive a full characterization for entanglement-breaking channels, and show that combining entanglement-assisted and unassisted coding is suboptimal. From a networking perspective, this finding is nontrivial and highlights a quantum behavior arising from superposition.