Dynamic EPR affectation documentation

[yoursunny]

#55 introduced two major features in ProactiveForwarder: statistical multiplexing and dynamic EPR affectation.

Statistical multiplexing is documented in Multiplexing schemes for quantum repeater networks as linked in README.

Dynamic EPR affectation is not mentioned in this paper and I have trouble finding relevant documents by searching this keyword.
Please post a reference link that describes this scheme, so that I can check the implementation against the protocol design.

[yoursunny]

Currently, the ProactiveForwarder implementation is very complicated because it contains support for three distinct modes:

• buffer-space multiplexing
• statistical multiplexing
• dynamic EPR affectation

Would a realistic deployment need all three modes in the same forwarder, or a single forwarder would only ever operate in one of those modes?
If it's the latter (i.e. each forwarder only needs to support one mode), I propose to split each mode into a subclass to simplify code.

[amar-ox]

• Dynamic EPR affectation is an experimental approach, part of our work related to Van Sy's models/heuristics. I can try to provide a quick description in Readme.
• At least for now, I think a forwarder (and even a network) would operate in the same multiplexing mode. So yes, splitting to subclasses would be relevant. Blocking mux can be seen as a special case of Buffer-space mux, where all qubit are affected to a single path (although forwarders can operate in blocking mux without explicit qubit-path allocation from the controller)

[yoursunny]

I can try to provide a quick description in Readme

You can write it here in the issue.
When the paper is ready, link to the paper from README.

[amar-ox]

So the dynamic EPR allocation is a work in progress. For now the idea is, given a channel that is shared by multiple paths, to find policies (heuristics) to allocate each new EPR to one of the paths to achieve some QoS or performance. This would be based on modeling the path dynamics (elementary links, swapping, fidelity, etc.)