Quantum entanglement is so fundamentally different from a network packet that several quantum network stacks have been proposed; one of which has even been experimentally demonstrated. Several simulators have also been developed to make up for limited hardware availability, and which facilitate the design and evaluation of quantum network protocols. However, the lack of shared tooling and community-agreed node architectures has resulted in protocol implementations that are tightly coupled to their simulators. Besides limiting their reusability between different simulators, it also makes building upon prior results and simulations difficult. To address this problem, we have developed QuIP: a P4-based Quantum Internet Protocol prototyping framework for quantum network protocol design. QuIP is a framework for designing and implementing quantum network protocols in a platform-agnostic fashion. It achieves this by providing the means to flexibly, but rigorously, define device architectures against which quantum network protocols can be implemented in the network programming language P4$_{16}$. QuIP also comes with the necessary tooling to enable their execution in existing quantum network simulators. We demonstrate its use by showcasing V1Quantum, a completely new device architecture, implementing a link- and network-layer protocol, and simulating it in the existing simulator NetSquid.

翻译：量子纠缠与网络数据包存在根本性差异，因此学界已提出多种量子网络协议栈，其中一种甚至已通过实验验证。为弥补硬件资源的不足，多个模拟器被开发出来以促进量子网络协议的设计与评估。然而，由于缺乏共享工具和社区共识的节点架构，现有协议实现往往与特定模拟器深度耦合。这不仅限制了协议在不同模拟器间的复用性，也使得在已有成果和模拟基础上进行扩展变得困难。为解决这一问题，我们开发了QuIP：一种基于P4的量子互联网协议原型设计框架，专门用于量子网络协议设计。QuIP支持以平台无关的方式设计和实现量子网络协议，其核心在于提供灵活而严谨的设备架构定义方法，使得量子网络协议可通过网络编程语言P4$_{16}$实现。该框架还配备了必要的工具链，以支持在现有量子网络模拟器中执行协议。我们通过展示V1Quantum这一全新设备架构来验证其可用性——该架构实现了链路层与网络层协议，并在现有模拟器NetSquid中完成了仿真验证。