Soft Reverse Reconciliation for Discrete Modulations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Origlia, Marco, Secondini, Marco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Origlia, Marco
Secondini, Marco
author_facet Origlia, Marco
Secondini, Marco
contents The performance of the information reconciliation phase is crucial for quantum key distribution (QKD). Reverse reconciliation (RR) is typically preferred over direct reconciliation (DR) because it yields higher secure key rates. However, a significant challenge in continuous-variable (CV) QKD with discrete modulations (such as QAM) is that Alice lacks soft information about the symbol decisions made by Bob. This limitation restricts error correction to hard-decoding methods, with low reconciliation efficiency. This work introduces a reverse reconciliation softening (RRS) procedure designed for CV-QKD scenarios employing discrete modulations. This procedure generates a soft metric that Bob can share with Alice over a public channel, enabling her to perform soft-decoding error correction without disclosing any information to a potential eavesdropper. After detailing the RRS procedure, we investigate how the mutual information between Alice's and Bob's variables changes when the additional metric is shared. We show numerically that RRS improves the mutual information with respect to RR with hard decoding, practically achieving the same mutual information as DR with soft decoding. Finally, we test the proposed RRS for PAM-4 signalling with a rate 1/2 binary LDPC code and bit-wise decoding through numerical simulations, obtaining more than 1dB SNR improvement compared to hard-decoding RR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_04063
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Soft Reverse Reconciliation for Discrete Modulations
Origlia, Marco
Secondini, Marco
Information Theory
Quantum Physics
The performance of the information reconciliation phase is crucial for quantum key distribution (QKD). Reverse reconciliation (RR) is typically preferred over direct reconciliation (DR) because it yields higher secure key rates. However, a significant challenge in continuous-variable (CV) QKD with discrete modulations (such as QAM) is that Alice lacks soft information about the symbol decisions made by Bob. This limitation restricts error correction to hard-decoding methods, with low reconciliation efficiency. This work introduces a reverse reconciliation softening (RRS) procedure designed for CV-QKD scenarios employing discrete modulations. This procedure generates a soft metric that Bob can share with Alice over a public channel, enabling her to perform soft-decoding error correction without disclosing any information to a potential eavesdropper. After detailing the RRS procedure, we investigate how the mutual information between Alice's and Bob's variables changes when the additional metric is shared. We show numerically that RRS improves the mutual information with respect to RR with hard decoding, practically achieving the same mutual information as DR with soft decoding. Finally, we test the proposed RRS for PAM-4 signalling with a rate 1/2 binary LDPC code and bit-wise decoding through numerical simulations, obtaining more than 1dB SNR improvement compared to hard-decoding RR.
title Soft Reverse Reconciliation for Discrete Modulations
topic Information Theory
Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04063