Towards a Blueprint for a Quantum Internet

Building the first large-scale quantum network is a highly challenging endeavor. Not only is it a highly contested question of what the most promising hardware platform might be, but even if we had selected one, it is unknown what the precise requirements for its realization would be.

In this talk, we will present a series of methods that can be used in order to determine minimal requirements of creating such a network on an existing fiber network infrastructure. We start by presenting an algorithm to perform a pre-selection of where quantum repeaters may be located on an existing fiber grid. We present a purpose built discrete event simulator that can be used to validate candidate architectures, and a matching machine learning method that can be used to determine minimal hardware (or software) requirements necessary to achieve a specific target functionality of the network. Finally, we provide an initial case study of a resulting Blueprint for a network architecture on the real world fiber grid of SURF in the Netherlands.