The conventional quantum teleportation schemes enable high-security network communications by establishing end-to-end entangled paths. However, those schemes focus on time synchronization and thus cause lots of idle time. Recent research suggests adopting an opportunistic scheme to forward data qubits as far as it can. However, this scheme lacks security since data qubits may be stored at malicious repeaters, which may peek at, destroy, or fake the data qubits. To this end, we design a new scheme called SOAR that considers trusted repeaters via social networks. Moreover, SOAR promotes the parallelism of swapping processes and thus leads to a less idle time of network resources than the other existing schemes. Furthermore, we design an algorithm called SAGE that can best fit SOAR by linking multiple subpaths via appropriate trusted repeaters to get an ideal path and augmenting least-hop paths to utilize the resources in quantum networks better. Simulation results manifest that SOAR outperforms the other schemes by 54%-89%; SAGE outperforms the other routing algorithms by 50% on average on SOAR.

Quantum teleportation through quantum entanglement over optical fiber channels enables secure communications. However, physical obstacles such as oceans and mountains may block optical fiber channels, and thus quantum networks (QNs) may have multiple disjoint domains. To overcome the issue, in this paper, we first propose a promising framework termed SSR to leverage satellite-based Free-Space Optical (FSO) channels to create inter-domain entangled paths for long-distance requests. Still, FSO channels may be intermittent due to satellite sparsity and atmospheric turbulence. Then, we introduce two algorithms, named RAIN and IDOL, to efficiently utilize FSO channels in SSR. RAIN estimates the existence probability of FSO channels to plan an appropriate inter-domain routing for each request while balancing domain loads. IDOL selects desired intra-domain paths and trusted repeaters for each request to teleport data qubits. Finally, simulation results manifest that SSR runs efficiently and outperforms existing approaches by 31%–57% in throughput.

Quantum teleportation via quantum entanglement enables high-security communications in networks. However, if two quantum nodes are far away, it may be difficult to create an entangled path due to the low success probability. Besides, existing approaches neglect social relations among nodes' owners. In this paper, we propose a new framework SEER to minimize the waiting time of all source-destination (SD) pairs' requests. SEER has two promising features: 1) Social-relation Consideration. SEER makes the first attempt to select trusted owners' nodes via social networks as intermediate nodes for requests to temporarily store data qubits to increase the success probability. 2) Starvation Mitigation. SEER divides long SD pairs and slices resources reasonably to remedy starvation due to their low success probability. To this end, we design RATE and PLAN to find the proper intermediate nodes and reduce the average waiting time. Simulation results manifest SEER outperforms others by 37%.