02.08.2023Open Position MEP/BEP
Open position for master thesis project: Simulation of a network protocol for resource sharing
Simulation of a network protocol for resource sharing
MSc Project opportunity in Professor Stephanie Wehner’s group
Daily Supervisor: Scarlett Gauthier (PhD candidate), contact s.s.gauthier@tudelft.nl
In a quantum network various types of resource sharing hubs are needed to enable high level functioning of the network. A typical example of a resource sharing station is a quantum repeater, which shares the resources necessary for entanglement swapping among multiple network nodes, enabling the distribution of entanglement over distances where the creation of good fidelity elementary links is not possible. Another possible type of resource sharing station is an Entanglement Generation Switch (EGS) (see Figure 1) which is a central station that controls several resource nodes which enable a specific entanglement generation protocol. An EGS employs a switching mechanism to allocate resource nodes to pairs of network nodes in order to facilitate entanglement generation attempts between the network nodes. We have developed a control protocol for how network nodes may request service from the EGS and demonstrated analytically that the protocol results in stable service which achieves the service metric of throughput optimality.

In this project you will implement the EGS control protocol in a network simulator, with the goal of investigating the protocol performance on realistic quantum network hardware. Possible questions to investigate include:
• How can this abstract protocol be translated into a protocol that runs on physical quantum network hardware, and how is the protocol performance impacted by physical parameters of the network hardware?
• How is the service quality metric impacted if we change the scheduling policy for allocating the network nodes, while keeping the service control protocol fixed?
• How do delays in the network impact the functioning of the protocol? Sources of delay could include the round trip communication time between network nodes and the EGS, calibration time associated with allocation of the resource nodes, or the time needed to calculate a schedule for allocating the resource nodes.