Study on application of polar codes to information reconciliation in free-space quantum key distribution

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a technology to securely share keys against any attack physically permitted, with the principle of quantum mechanics. In recent years, the satellite QKD, which employs artificial satellites as trusted mobile nodes, has been attracting attention in order to overcome the bottleneck of transmission distance. However, in the satellite QKD, quality degradation due to atmospheric effects is expected, as in ordinary satellite laser communications. Therefore, it is desirable to apply an error-correcting code (ECC) that has high error-correcting performance even under the atmospheric-induced effects to the error-correcting process of the satellite QKD. Therefore, in this paper, we examined the application of polar codes, which is known as an ECC with high error correction capability. First, in order to optimize the error correction efficiency, we propose a method to adaptively obtain an appropriate code rate for the received signal strength that changes momentarily due to atmospheric effects. Then, we compare the throughput performances with polar codes to it with low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, with the numerical simulation assuming Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol (BB84).

[1]  Ryo Namiki,et al.  Implementation of continuous-variable quantum key distribution with discrete modulation , 2017, Quantum Science and Technology.

[2]  Christoph Pacher,et al.  The SECOQC quantum key distribution network in Vienna , 2009, 2009 35th European Conference on Optical Communication.

[3]  Kai Chen,et al.  CRC-Aided Decoding of Polar Codes , 2012, IEEE Communications Letters.

[4]  Toshiyuki Ito,et al.  Free space optical secret key agreement. , 2018, Optics express.

[5]  Gilles Brassard,et al.  Quantum cryptography: Public key distribution and coin tossing , 2014, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[6]  Sébastien Kunz-Jacques,et al.  High performance error correction for quantum key distribution using polar codes , 2014, Quantum Inf. Comput..

[7]  E. Okamoto,et al.  Experimental Evaluation of Polar Code Transmission in Terrestrial Free-Space Optics , 2019, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Space Optical Systems and Applications (ICSOS).

[8]  Erdal Arikan,et al.  Channel Polarization: A Method for Constructing Capacity-Achieving Codes for Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[9]  A R Dixon,et al.  Field test of quantum key distribution in the Tokyo QKD Network. , 2011, Optics express.

[10]  Alexander Vardy,et al.  List decoding of polar codes , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings.

[11]  A. Tajima,et al.  High-Speed Quantum Key Distribution System for 1-Mbps Real-Time Key Generation , 2012, IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics.

[12]  Alexander Ling,et al.  Progress in satellite quantum key distribution , 2017, 1707.03613.

[13]  Ekert,et al.  Quantum cryptography based on Bell's theorem. , 1991, Physical review letters.

[14]  Rafail Ostrovsky,et al.  Fuzzy Extractors: How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics and Other Noisy Data , 2004, SIAM J. Comput..

[15]  N. Cerf,et al.  Quantum key distribution using gaussian-modulated coherent states , 2003, Nature.