Alejandra Ruiz

David Barral, Aitor Brazaola-Vicario, Diego Cifrián et al.

QKD technology is being increasingly adopted inside the network core for protecting information transport against any form of computational attacks. However, the use of QKD for wide-area internetworking is still challenging and costly, due to its strong trust assumptions and the low achievable key rates in long QKD links. This paper presents a standards-driven design and implementation of a unified hybrid key delivery service for a network of isolated QKD domains (subnetworks using QKD as provider technology for secret key generation) connected via classical WAN links. The framework follows a distributed architecture and uses a hybrid approach where keys generated in a domain are securely relayed to other domains with PQC (Kyber), dynamically routed, and managed at the system level. The solution has been implemented in an operational testbed comprising three regional subnetworks. We present the design principles, the deployment, and the experimental performance results for this scalable key delivery service.

Eneko Osaba, Pablo Miranda-Rodriguez, Andreas Oikonomakis et al.

This paper presents a novel hybrid approach to solving real-world drone routing problems by leveraging the capabilities of quantum computing. The proposed method, coined Quantum for Drone Routing (Q4DR), integrates the two most prominent paradigms in the field: quantum gate-based computing, through the Eclipse Qrisp programming language; and quantum annealers, by means of D-Wave System's devices. The algorithm is divided into two different phases: an initial clustering phase executed using a Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), and a routing phase employing quantum annealers. The efficacy of Q4DR is demonstrated through three use cases of increasing complexity, each incorporating real-world constraints such as asymmetric costs, forbidden paths, and itinerant charging points. This research contributes to the growing body of work in quantum optimization, showcasing the practical applications of quantum computing in logistics and route planning.