Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Recently, a multi-user quantum network with the ability to distribute and process quantum information hasbeen realised. However, despite that a lot of work has been put into enhancing devices for quantumnetworks for higher speed and better error tolerance, there are no specific proposals on how to operate andmanage such a network on a large scale. To draw an analogy with a classical network, we are at a stagewhere we can start to physically connect our devices and establish communication link, but all sending,receiving, buffer management, connection synchronisation, and so on must be managed by the applicationdirectly using low-level, hardware-specific interfaces, rather than being managed by a network stack thatexposes a convenient high-level interface. The objective of this research is to introduce and define the basicarchitectural principles for a quantum internet at a high-layer perspective, and explore the possibilities ofquantum network beyond the one-trick pony "entanglement distribution".