Path-Oblivious Entanglement Swapping for the Quantum Internet

Abstract: Proposed Bell pair swapping protocols, an essential component of the Quantum Internet, are planned-path: specific, structured, routing paths are reserved prior to the execution of the swapping process. This makes sense when one assumes the state used in the swapping process is expensive, fragile, and unstable. However, lessons from classical networking have shown that while reservations seem promising in concept, flexible, reservation-light or free approaches often outperform their more restrictive counterparts in well-provisioned networks. In this paper, we propose that a path-oblivious approach is more amenable to supporting swapping as quantum state evolves into a cheaper, more robust form. We formulate the swapping process as a linear program and present and evaluate a fairly naive baseline swapping protocol that tries to balance Bell pairs throughout the network. Preliminary results show that while naive balancing leaves room for improvement, investigating path-oblivious swapping is a promising direction.