Quantum communications is a promising technology that will play a fundamental role in the design of future networks. In fact, significant efforts are being undertaken by both the quantum physics and the classical communications communities on developing new architectures, solutions, and practical implementations of quantum communication networks (QCNs). Although these efforts led to various advances in today's technologies, there still exists a non-trivial gap between the research efforts of the two communities on designing and optimizing the performance of QCNs. For instance, most prior works by the classical communications community ignore important quantum physics-based constraints when designing QCNs. For example, many existing works on entanglement distribution do not account for the decoherence of qubits inside quantum memories and, thus, their designs become impractical since they assume an infinite lifetime of quantum states. In this article, we bring forth a novel analysis of the performance of QCNs in a physics-informed manner, by relying on the quantum physics principles that underly the different components of QCNs. The need for the physics-informed approach is then assessed and its fundamental role in designing practical QCNs is analyzed across various open research areas. Moreover, we identify novel physics-informed performance metrics and controls that enable QCNs to leverage the state-of-theart advancements in quantum technologies to enhance their performance. Finally, we analyze multiple pressing challenges and open research directions in QCNs that must be treated using a physics-informed approach to lead practically viable results. Ultimately, this work attempts to bridge the gap between the classical communications and the quantum physics communities in the area of QCNs to foster the development of the future communication networks toward the quantum Internet.

中文翻译：

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基于物理的量子通信网络：量子互联网的愿景


量子通信是一项有前途的技术，将在未来网络的设计中发挥基础作用。事实上，量子物理学和经典通信界正在做出重大努力，开发量子通信网络（QCN）的新架构、解决方案和实际实现。尽管这些努力带来了当今技术的各种进步，但两个社区在设计和优化 QCN 性能方面的研究工作之间仍然存在着巨大的差距。例如，经典通信界的大多数先前工作在设计 QCN 时都忽略了基于量子物理的重要约束。例如，许多现有的关于纠缠分布的工作没有考虑量子存储器内量子位的退相干，因此，它们的设计变得不切实际，因为它们假设量子态的寿命是无限的。在本文中，我们依靠 QCN 不同组件背后的量子物理原理，以物理知情的方式对 QCN 的性能进行了新颖的分析。然后评估对物理知情方法的需求，并在各个开放研究领域分析其在设计实用 QCN 中的基本作用。此外，我们还确定了新颖的物理信息性能指标和控制，使 QCN 能够利用量子技术的最先进进步来提高其性能。最后，我们分析了 QCN 中的多个紧迫挑战和开放研究方向，必须使用基于物理的方法来处理这些挑战，才能产生实际可行的结果。 最终，这项工作试图弥合经典通信和 QCN 领域的量子物理界之间的差距，以促进未来通信网络向量子互联网的发展。