Index-Based Scheduling for a Resource-Constrained Quantum Switch
This work addresses efficient resource allocation in quantum networks, which is an incremental improvement for quantum communication systems.
The paper tackles the problem of scheduling multipartite entanglement requests in a quantum switch with limited memory by proposing policies to optimize the average number of requests served per unit time, using a restless multi-armed bandit framework and achieving a closed-form Whittle index expression.
We consider a quantum switch with a finite number of quantum memory registers that aims to serve multipartite entanglement requests among $N$ users. We propose scheduling policies that aim to optimize the average number of requests served per unit time by efficiently utilizing the switch's available memory. To measure the performance of the scheduling policies, we employ the newly introduced metric of age of entanglement establishment (AoEE). We formulate the scheduling problem in a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) framework. We show that the scheduling of entanglement requests is indexable. Subsequently, we find a closed-form expression of the Whittle index for all possible request-age pairs. By modeling the Whittle index of each request as its reward and its cardinality as its cost, we formulate the memory-constrained scheduling problem as a $0$-$1$ knapsack problem and solve it via dynamic programming. Furthermore, we consider two low-complexity sequential greedy policies that leverage two different modified Whittle indices.