Maximum Key-based Joint Topology Construction and Routing over Quantum Satellite Networks

Quantum key resources in quantum satellite networks are fundamental to confidential data forwarding, which highly depends on the network topology. In this paper, we propose a network topology construction scheme via formulating the dynamic link establishment among network nodes as an integer linear programming to maximize the number of available quantum keys in the topology. Then we solve this topology optimization problem through subgradient method based on the Lagrange duality theory. Under the optimized topology, we further propose a key-based routing and resource allocation (KRRA) algorithm to forward secret keys for ground stations. The simulation results show that our scheme performs better than the benchmark method with the minimum route distance in terms of the number of quantum keys and the success probability of real-time secret key forwarding service.