Asymmetric Adaptive LDPC-Based Information Reconciliation for Industrial Quantum Key Distribution

• Published in: Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 25; no. 1; p. 31
• Main Authors: Borisov, Nikolay, Petrov, Ivan, Tayduganov, Andrey
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 23.12.2022; MDPI
• Subjects: Adaptation; adaptive error correction; Algorithms; Channel capacity; Codes; Design; Efficiency; Error correcting codes; Error correction; Error correction & detection; information reconciliation; LDPC; Low density parity check codes; Parameter estimation; Personal computers; quantum communication; Quantum cryptography; quantum key distribution (QKD); Reconciliation; Resource allocation; Transmitters; LDPC; information reconciliation; adaptive error correction; quantum communication; quantum key distribution (QKD)
• ISSN: 1099-4300; 1099-4300
• DOI: 10.3390/e25010031

We develop a new approach for asymmetric LDPC-based information reconciliation in order to adapt to the current channel state and achieve better performance and scalability in practical resource-constrained QKD systems. The new scheme combines the advantages of LDPC codes, a priori error rate estimation, rate-adaptive and blind information reconciliation techniques. We compare the performance of several asymmetric and symmetric error correction schemes using a real industrial QKD setup. The proposed asymmetric algorithm achieves significantly higher throughput, providing a secret key rate that is close to the symmetric one in a wide range of error rates. Thus, our approach is found to be particularly efficient for applications with high key rates, limited classical channel capacity and asymmetric computational resource allocation.