Reconciliation is an essential part of any secret-key agreement protocol and hence of a Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocol, where two legitimate parties are given correlated data and want to agree on a common string in the presence of an adversary, while revealing a minimum amount of information. In this paper, we show that for discrete-variable QKD protocols, this problem can be advantageously solved with Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes optimized for the BSC. In particular, we demonstrate that our method leads to a significant improvement of the achievable secret key rate, with respect to earlier interactive reconciliation methods used in QKD.
@article{arxiv.0901.2140,
title = {Efficient reconciliation protocol for discrete-variable quantum key distribution},
author = {David Elkouss and Anthony Leverrier and Romain Alléaume and Joseph Boutros},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0901.2140},
year = {2011}
}