Wavelength Division Multiplexing Quantum Key Distribution with High Throughput Key Distillation Engine

Akihiro Tanaka (System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation), Mikio Fujiwara (Quantum ICT Laboratory, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology), Ken-Ichiro Yoshino (Green Innovations Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation), Seigo Takahashi (System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation), Yoshihiro Nambu (Green Innovations Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation), Akihisa Tomita (Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University), Shigehito Miki (Nano ICT Laboratory, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology), Taro Yamashita (Nano ICT Laboratory, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology), Zhen Wang (Nano ICT Laboratory, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology), Akio Tajima (System Platforms Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation) and Masahide Sasaki (Quantum ICT Laboratory, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology)

 

For the past ten years, quantum key distribution (QKD) research has been engaged in field network experiments [1-3]. The progress in these two years was especially remarkable. Secure key rates became about 100 times faster and the distance extended nearly twice. QKD technologies have reached a level to encrypt movie data by one-time-pad (OTP) in a metropolitan area network [3]. Toward real applications of QKD to OTP for high-end secure communications, scalable implementation for faster secure key rate and security assurance in practical conditions are highly requested. The secure key rate directly depends on the performance of photon detectors. Further drastic improvement of photon detector performance, however, may not be easy with current technology. So it should be indispensable to cope with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) of quantum channels. The security assurance is a much involved issue. It includes the identification of side- channels and their counter-measures, and the details of key distillation process.

In this paper we study a GHz clocked WDM-QKD systems based on decoy-state BB843 using both semiconductor and superconductor photon detectors, and key distillation engine that can process a huge amount of raw keys in a large block size.