Paper Info
Title
A Scalable Quantum Key Distribution Network Testbed Using Parallel Discrete-Event Simulation
Abstract
AbstractQuantum key distribution (QKD) has been promoted as a means for secure communications. Although QKD has been widely implemented in many urban fiber networks, the large-scale deployment of QKD remains challenging. Today, researchers extensively conduct simulation-based evaluations for their designs and applications of large-scale QKD networks for cost efficiency. However, the existing discrete-event simulators offer models for QKD hardware and protocols based on sequential event execution, which limits the scale of the experiments. In this work, we explore parallel simulation of QKD networks to address this issue. Our contributions lay in the exploration of QKD network characteristics to be leveraged for parallel simulation as well as the development of a parallel simulation framework for QKD networks. We also investigate three techniques to improve the simulation performance including (1) a ladder queue based event list, (2) memoization for computationally intensive quantum state transformation information, and (3) optimization of the network partition scheme for workload balance. The experimental results show that our parallel simulator is 10 times faster than a sequential simulator when simulating a 128-node QKD network. Our linear-regression-based network partition scheme can further accelerate the simulation experiments up to two times over using a randomized network partition scheme.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3490029
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Parallel discrete-event simulation, quantum key distribution, BB84
Journal
32
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1049-3301
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaoliang Wu100.34
Bo Zhang2419.80
Gong Chen300.34
Dong Jin400.34