Locally distinguish orthogonal quantum states with entanglement resources

It is known that many sets of orthogonal quantum states, which cannot be distinguished perfectly by local operations and classical communication (LOCC), have been constructed. However, these discussions have left the following open question: How many entanglement resources are necessary and/or sufficient for this task to be possible with LOCC? In this paper, we present a local discrimination protocol which uses entanglement more efficiently than teleportation to distinguish one class of orthogonal product states in 3⊗3⊗3. Then, we generalize it for 3⊗3⊗...⊗3 quantum systems which has 3n parties. For the open question, our results offer rather general insight into why entanglement is useful for such tasks, and present a better understanding of the relationship between entanglement and nonlocality.