Abstract
Quantum key distribution (QKD) generates a secret key for both parties of remote communication in a theoretically proven secure manner. Blind reconciliation, which does not require an estimate of qubit error rate (QBER), saves the key bits overhead of QBER estimation and improves the reconciliation efficiency. Although the current polar-code-based blind reconciliation scheme has a high level of efficiency, it also has a low throughput of secure key generation, as well as large consumption of truly random bits, communication, and computational resources. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a blind reconciliation scheme based on the inverse encoding of polar codes with adaptive step sizes. The proposed scheme improves the overall final secret key rate of a practical QKD system through step-size adaptation and decreases the consumption of truly random bits, communication, and computational resources through inverse encoding. The experimental results compared with the fixed step sizes show that the proposed protocol can greatly reduce the number of interactions with little loss of reconciliation efficiency. With 1024-bit polar codes, the proposed protocol can increase the throughput of the final secure key generation by reducing the number of interactions and communication delays by up to 38.72%. In each reconciliation of N-bit keys with an initial polar code rate k/N, k truly random bits, three operations of N-bit exclusive-OR, and one polar encoding can be saved. The inverse encoding of polar codes with length \(N = 2^{15}\) can reduce the computational time of the protocol process by 10.29%.
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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grants 2018YFB1801900 and 2019YFE0123600, in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62171202 and 62075088, in part by Guangdong Provincial Postgraduate Education Innovation Project under Grant 2019SFKC08, in part by Project of Guangzhou Industry Leading Talents under Grant CXLJTD-201607, European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement under Grant 872172 (TESTBED2 project: www.testbed2.org).
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Xie, J., Jiang, C., Lin, J. et al. Blind reconciliation based on inverse encoding of polar codes with adaptive step sizes for quantum key distribution. Quantum Inf Process 21, 349 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-022-03692-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-022-03692-6