With the rapid development and early industrialization of quantum technologies, it is of great interest to analyze their overall energy consumption before planning for their wide-scale deployments. The evaluation of the total energy requirements of quantum networks is a challenging task: different networks require very disparate techniques to create, distribute, manipulate, detect, and process quantum signals. This paper aims to lay the foundations of a framework to model the energy requirements of different quantum technologies and protocols applied to near-term quantum networks. Different figures of merit are discussed and a benchmark on the energy consumption of bipartite and multipartite network protocols is presented. An open-source software to estimate the energy consumption of photonic setups is also provided.
@article{arxiv.2410.10661,
title = {Energetic Analysis of Emerging Quantum Communication Protocols},
author = {Raja Yehia and Yoann Piétri and Carlos Pascual-García and Pascal Lefebvre and Federico Centrone},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.10661},
year = {2025}
}