Traffic Engineering in Quantum Networks: A Caching-Enabled Approach to Entanglement Routing

With the enhanced security offered by quantum teleportation, quantum networks (QNs) are gradually gaining significant attention. However, previous research on QNs often exhausts all network resources to serve requests, hence overlooking the scarce resources in QN. This oversight easily leads to resource wastage and requests competing for limited resources. To address the above issues, this paper introduces a new optimization problem named EINS, which minimizes the maximum resource utilization and finds routing paths for each request through certain intermediate nodes. This design cleverly divides the routing path into segments to enhance routing path diversity. To solve the EINS, we design a novel algorithm named GOAL, which provides an <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$O(\log\vert V\vert)$</tex> bound for constraint deviation. It efficiently and equitably distributes requests, ensuring optimal network utilization. Finally, the simulation results manifest that GOAL can outperform the existing methods by up to 99%.