Q-Backbone: A Quantum-Enhanced Control Plane for Future Communication Networks
This work addresses the computational bottleneck of network-wide decision-making for communication network operators, but the proposal is largely architectural and the evaluation is limited to a single case study.
Q-Backbone proposes a quantum-enhanced control plane for future communication networks, integrating quantum processing units as accelerators. In a case study on deadline-aware orchestration, it serves up to 25% more jobs than existing quantum-cloud scheduling baselines.
Future networks will need to make network-wide decisions, including traffic engineering, network slicing, and wireless optimization, under strict latency, energy, and reliability constraints. The computational complexity of these problems increasingly challenges classical optimization methods. This article proposes Q-Backbone (QB), a quantum-enhanced control plane for communication networks in which quantum processing units (QPUs) operate alongside classical computing resources as accelerators for network intelligence. QB is designed as a fourlayer architecture that combines heterogeneous infrastructure, hybrid quantum-classical runtime services, policy-driven task orchestration, and communication-network applications. A central component of QB is the Quantum Invocation Policy (QIP), which dynamically determines when quantum acceleration is beneficial and when classical execution should be preferred. A case study on deadline-aware orchestration of distributed quantum jobs over heterogeneous QPUs shows that QB can improve workload execution under tight deadline constraints, serving up to 25% more jobs than existing quantum-cloud scheduling baselines. Finally, open challenges and opportunities towards the deployment of QB are highlighted and discussed.