Call for Papers

Quantum communication researchers have achieved significant progress during the recent decades and quantum networking has shown promise in terms of improving the overall functional benefits of the Internet and enabling applications with no counterpart in the classical world. It is a breakthrough technology towards the unimaginable future. In a quantum network, the source and destination may be connected by quantum repeaters/routers for facilitating qubit transmissions. The quantum network of the future is envisaged to pervade the entire globe, relying on terrestrial components, satellites, airplanes, ships and other vehicles. It is anticipated that it will support nearly unconditional security, super-computing power, large network capacity – even at high velocity - and privacy.

In the current era, quantum networks are similar to the early stage of the classical Internet in the 1970s. However, they exhibit fundamentally different features, obeying the uncertainty principle, the non-orthogonal indistinguishable theorem, the quantum non-cloning theorem, entanglement and superposition. These constraining features make the design of quantum networks a challenging task. To make the promise of quantum networking a reality, the entire protocol stack spanning from the physical-layer enabling techniques to the application layer requires a dedicated collaborative effort from a large fraction of the engineering and physics community. 

This Special Issue (SI) focuses on recent advances in quantum communications and networking, and we seek original contributions in quantum networking architectures, concepts, protocols, and technologies in support of long-distance qubit transmissions and novel network applications. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Quantum communication and networking applications
• Quantum network architectures and design principles
• Entanglement generation, scheduling, and distribution
• Quantum information theory and communication protocol
• Quantum memory and repeater design
• Quantum routing metrics and new routing algorithms
• Congestion control and resource allocation for quantum networks
• Quantum data plane and quantum control plane design
• Security, privacy, and trust in the context of quantum networks
• Quantum network management
• Simulators, testbeds, prototypes, implementations, and field experiments
• Verification of the existing knowledge in real quantum networks
• Performance evaluation and modeling
• Migration from classical networks to quantum networks

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the "Information for Authors" section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select ‘September 2022/QCN’ from the drop-down menu of topic titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 20 April 2022
Initial Decision Notification: 31 May 2022
Revised Manuscript Due: 30 June 2022
Final Decision Notification: 15 July 2022
Final Manuscript Due: 31 July 2022
Publication Date: September 2022

Guest Editors

Ruidong Li
Kanazawa University, Japan

Prineha Narang
Havard University, USA

Melchior Aelmans
Juniper Networks, Netherlands

Guoliang Xue
Arizona State University, USA

Peter Mueller
IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland

Guilu Long
Tsinghua University, China