Quantum-Accelerated Wireless Communications: Concepts, Connections, and Implications

TL;DR

This paper surveys how quantum computing could accelerate wireless communications, emphasizing Grover-based quadratic speedups for unstructured search and the resource hurdles of fault-tolerant quantum computing. It builds intuition by mapping quantum primitives to communications concepts and introduces the Grover Adaptive Search framework as a practical route for optimization problems in wireless systems. Through two case studies—detection/decoding and combinatorial optimization—it shows that careful problem formulation, oracle design, and initialization can yield meaningful speedups and circuit simplifications, supported by simulations. It also highlights a mathematical harmony via Grassmann manifolds linking quantum state geometry to Grassmannian codebooks used in precoding and tomography, and discusses open challenges such as quantum error correction and cost-effectiveness for real deployments, outlining a roadmap for interdisciplinary research at the quantum–wireless frontier.

Abstract

Quantum computing is poised to redefine the algorithmic foundations of communication systems. While quantum superposition and entanglement enable quadratic or exponential speedups for specific problems, identifying use cases where these advantages yield engineering benefits is still nontrivial. This article presents the fundamentals of quantum computing in a style familiar to the communications society, outlining the current limits of fault-tolerant quantum computing and clarifying a mathematical harmony between quantum and wireless systems, which makes the topic more enticing to wireless researchers. Based on a systematic review of pioneering and state-of-the-art studies indicating speedup opportunities, we distill common design trends for the research and development of quantum-accelerated communication systems and highlight lessons learned. The key insight is that quantum algorithms, including their gate-level realizations, can benefit from the design intuition applied in communication engineering. This article aims to catalyze interdisciplinary research at the frontier of quantum information processing and future communication systems.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: The Bloch sphere in quantum computation and a Grassmannian codebook in wireless communications. A single-qubit quantum gate operation can be represented as a rotation of a quantum state about an arbitrary axis of the Bloch sphere. The MIMO codebook here is known as MUB in quantum measurement theory.
• Figure 2: Similarities between quantum and wireless systems, such as equal superposition and sparse unitary matrices.
• Figure 3: Card-flipping analogy illustrating Grover's quadratic speedup. A classical exhaustive search requires, in the worst case, $N$ flips to reveal the desired card, whereas Grover's algorithm finds it with about $\sqrt{N}$ queries.
• Figure 4: An overview of the quantum circuit for Grover adaptive search, where $n=4$ qubits hold candidate solutions and $m=3$ qubits encode their costs as phases. An inverse quantum Fourier transform (IQFT) turns those phases into amplitudes, then repeated oracle-flip and Grover diffusion operations amplify the desired state, which is read out by measurement.
• Figure 5: Timeline of early pioneering studies on the application of CIM, QA, QAOA, and Grover-based algorithms to communication systems.