A Quantum Internet Protocol Suite Beyond Layering
Angela Sara Cacciapuoti, Marcello Caleffi
TL;DR
This paper argues that classical layering is fundamentally misaligned with the Quantum Internet’s entanglement-driven, stateful behavior. It proposes a quantum-native organizational principle centered on a Dynamic Kernel that builds local Plans of Actions from node state and an in-band meta-header carrying a monotone sequence of action commits, thereby enabling a distributed, scalable end-to-end fulfillment without global synchronization. Service progression emerges as a network-wide DAG of commits, certified hop-by-hop through stamps, with optional control-plane hints used only for optimization. The framework is modular, MP/MeP-agnostic, and encoding-agnostic, promising robust adaptability to entanglement dynamics and hardware evolution, and it lays a foundation for standardization and practical quantum networking implementations.
Abstract
Layering, the protocol organization principle underpinning the classical Internet, is ill-suited to the Quantum Internet, built around entanglement, which is non-local and stateful. This paper proposes a quantum-native organizational principle based on dynamic composition, which replaces static layering with a distributed orchestration fabric driven by the node local state and in-band control. Each node runs a Dynamic Kernel that i) constructs a local PoA of candidate steps to advance a service intent, and ii) executes the PoA by composing atomic micro-protocols into context-aware procedures (the meta-protocols). Quantum packets carry an in-band control-field (the meta-header) containing the service intent and an append-only list of action-commit records, termed as stamps. Successive nodes exploit this minimal, authoritative history to construct their local PoAs. As quantum packets progress, these local commits collectively induce a network-wide, direct acyclic graph that certifies end-to-end service fulfillment, without requiring global synchronization. In contrast to classical encapsulation, the proposed suite enforces order by certification: dependency-aware local scheduling decides what may run at a certain node, stamps certify what did run and constrain subsequent planning. By embedding procedural control within the quantum packet, the design ensures coherence and consistency between entanglement-state evolution and control-flow, preventing divergence between resource state ad protocol logic, while remaining MP-agnostic and implementation-decoupled. The resulting suite is modular, adaptable to entanglement dynamics, and scalable. It operates correctly with or without optional control-plane hints. Indeed, when present, hints can steer QoS policies, without changing semantics. We argue that dynamic composition is the organizing principle required for a truly quantum-native Internet.