Simulation of Quantum Network Protocols with SeQUeNCe

We develop models of quantum network protocols and simulate their behavior in metropolitan optical quantum networks equipped with repeater nodes. We build models of quantum repeaters equipped with atomic quantum memories and use the Barrett-Kok protocol to generate and distribute entanglement between nearest pairs of repeaters. An entanglement swapping protocol is used to extend the entanglement to any pair of network nodes. Finally, we also model the BBPSSW purification protocol to mitigate errors in entanglement generation and swapping procedures. We use the Simulator of QUantum Network Communication (SeQUeNCe), an open-source tool that our team introduced, to quantify performance of these protocols in a model of the Chicago metropolitan quantum network. We simulate six network configurations using different hardware parameters, such as different quantum memory management policies and assumptions about classical message latencies. Our simulation results illustrate that high latency of control messages can significantly limit the performance of the network, as well as the impact of quantum memory parameters on the overall performance.