General Scheme for Perfect Quantum Network Coding with Free Classical Communication

Understand

This paper considers the problem of efficiently transmitting quantum states through a network.

• It has been known for some time that without additional assumptions it is impossible to achieve this task perfectly in general -- indeed, it is impossible even for the simple butterfly network.
• As additional resource we allow free classical communication between any pair of network nodes.
• It is shown that perfect quantum network coding is achievable in this model whenever classical network coding is possible over the same network when replacing all quantum capacities by classical capacities.