[Qirg] Comments about stages in draft-irtf-qirg-quantum-internet-use-cases

[Wojciech Kozlowski <[e-mail]>]

Hi QIRG,

At the IETF meeting on 10 March, I raised some concerns about how the stages were expressed in this draft. I have read through carefully now and discussed it with some people and I have the following comments:

The network stages are defined based on application capabilities and NOT based on distance. Therefore, when summarising the network stages from the paper, the draft should not be mentioning distances. Currently there's a lot of focus put on distance. This means that stage-1: "trusted repeater stage" means basically QKD-only. Stage-2: "prepare-and-measure" means we can do QKD *and* other applications that only require prepare-and-measure functionality. Note that there is no statement about achievable distances - only about the end-node capabilities. Stage-3 allows end-to-end entanglement creation and so on.

Therefore, my practical feedback to the I-D authors is to forget about distances and rephrase in terms of application capabilities.

However, this raises an interesting point that perhaps the QIRG/I-D authors may want to consider is whether one may want to put some further thought as how distance capabilities affect the use cases as that is not covered by these aforementioned stages. I think it would be valuable if the community has any thoughts on this point.

Best,
Wojtek