Generating a long-distance quantum entanglement is one of the most essential functions of a quantum network to support quantum communication and computing applications. The successful entanglement rate during a probabilistic entanglement process decreases dramatically with distance, and swapping is a widely-applied quantum technique to address this issue. Most existing entanglement routing protocols use a classic entanglement-swapping method based on Bell State measurements that can only fuse two successful entanglement links. This paper appeals to a more general and efficient swapping method, namely n-fusion based on Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger measurements that can fuse n successful entanglement links, to maximize the entanglement rate for multiple quantum-user pairs over a quantum network. We propose efficient entanglement routing algorithms that utilize the properties of n-fusion for quantum networks with general topologies. Evaluation results highlight that our proposed algorithm under n-fusion can greatly improve the network performance compared with existing ones.

翻译：生成远距离量子纠缠是量子网络支持量子通信与计算应用的核心功能之一。在概率性纠缠过程中，成功纠缠率随距离增加急剧下降，而纠缠交换是解决该问题的广泛应用量子技术。现有纠缠路由协议大多采用基于贝尔态测量的经典交换方法，该方法仅能融合两段成功纠缠链路。本文提出一种更通用高效的交换方法——基于格林伯格-霍恩-泽林格测量的n路融合技术，可融合n段成功纠缠链路，以最大化量子网络中多用户对的纠缠率。我们设计了一种利用n路融合特性的高效纠缠路由算法，适用于通用拓扑结构的量子网络。评估结果表明，与现有方案相比，基于n路融合的算法能显著提升网络性能。