Quantum entanglement distribution between remote nodes is key to many promising quantum applications. Existing mechanisms have mainly focused on improving throughput and fidelity via entanglement routing or single-node scheduling. This paper considers entanglement scheduling and distribution among many source-destination pairs with different requests over an entire quantum network topology. Two practical scenarios are considered. When requests do not have deadlines, we seek to minimize the average completion time of the communication requests. If deadlines are specified, we seek to maximize the number of requests whose deadlines are met. Inspired by optimal scheduling disciplines in conventional single-queue scenarios, we design a general optimization framework for entanglement scheduling and distribution called ESDI, and develop a probabilistic protocol to implement the optimized solutions in a general buffered quantum network. We develop a discrete-time quantum network simulator for evaluation. Results show the superior performance of ESDI compared to existing solutions.

翻译：远程节点间的量子纠缠分发是许多有前景的量子应用的关键。现有机制主要侧重于通过纠缠路由或单节点调度来提升吞吐量与保真度。本文考虑在整张量子网络拓扑中，针对多个具有不同请求的源-目的节点对进行纠缠调度与分发。研究涉及两种实际场景：当请求无截止期限时，我们旨在最小化通信请求的平均完成时间；若设定了截止期限，则力求最大化满足截止期限的请求数量。受经典单队列场景中最优调度策略的启发，我们设计了一个名为ESDI的通用优化框架，用于纠缠调度与分发，并开发了一种概率协议，以在通用带缓冲量子网络中实现优化方案。我们构建了一个离散时间量子网络仿真器进行评估。结果表明，与现有解决方案相比，ESDI展现出优越性能。