Enabling quantum switches (QSs) to serve requests submitted by quantum end nodes in quantum communication networks (QCNs) is a challenging problem due to the heterogeneous fidelity requirements of the submitted requests and the limited resources of the QCN. Effectively determining which requests are served by a given QS is fundamental to foster developments in practical QCN applications, like quantum data centers. However, the state-of-the-art on QS operation has overlooked this association problem, and it mainly focused on QCNs with a single QS. In this paper, the request-QS association problem in QCNs is formulated as a matching game that captures the limited QCN resources, heterogeneous application-specific fidelity requirements, and scheduling of the different QS operations. To solve this game, a swap-stable request-QS association (RQSA) algorithm is proposed while considering partial QCN information availability. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed RQSA algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed RQSA algorithm achieves a near-optimal (within 5%) performance in terms of the percentage of served requests and overall achieved fidelity, while outperforming benchmark greedy solutions by over 13%. Moreover, the proposed RQSA algorithm is shown to be scalable and maintain its near-optimal performance even when the size of the QCN increases.

翻译：量子交换机（QS）为量子通信网络（QCN）中量子终端节点提交的请求提供服务时，面临请求异构保真度要求与QCN资源有限的挑战。如何有效确定特定QS应服务哪些请求，是推动量子数据中心等实际QCN应用发展的关键问题。然而，现有QS运行研究忽略了这一关联问题，主要聚焦于单QS的QCN场景。本文将QCN中的请求-QS关联问题建模为匹配博弈，该模型同时考虑了QCN资源限制、异构应用保真度需求及不同QS操作的调度。针对该博弈，提出了一种考虑部分QCN信息可用性的交换稳定请求-QS关联（RQSA）算法。通过大量仿真验证了所提RQSA算法的有效性。结果表明：在服务请求占比和总体保真度方面，RQSA算法可实现接近最优（误差≤5%）的性能，同时优于贪婪基线方案超过13%。此外，该算法展现出良好的可扩展性，即使在QCN规模扩大时仍能保持近优性能。