A MATLAB-based modelling and simulation package for DPS-QKD
Anuj Sethia, Anindita Banerjee
Abstract
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is an ingenious technology utilizing quantum information science for provable secure communication. However, owing to the technological limitations and device non-idealities it is important to analyse the system performance critically and carefully define the implementation security. With an acceleration in the commercial adoption of QKD, a simulation toolkit is requisite to evaluate the functional architecture of QKD protocols. We present a simulation framework to model practical implementation of differential phase shift (DPS) QKD. The detailed device-level modelling and analysis capabilities of the present toolkit based on Simulink and MATLAB have the potential to provide a universal toolkit for practical design and implementation of generalized QKD protocols. Further, the absence of any modelling framework for DPS QKD and its simplistic optical schematic made it an obvious choice for the authors. We are hopeful that this work will pave way for simulating other QKD protocols from the DPR family.