Don Towsley, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Thursday, June 11, 2026 18:00
Amphi 34B, Sorbonne University - Faculté des Sciences

Quantum Networks: A Classical Perspective

Don Towsley holds a B.A. in Physics (1971) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1975) from University of Texas. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts in the College of Information & Computer Sciences. His research interests include quantum information systems. He co-founded ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems (ToMPECS) and served as one of its first co-Editor in Chiefs. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and on numerous editorial boards. He served as Program Co-chair and program committees for numerous conferences. He is a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards including the 2007 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award and the 2023 Network Science Society Euler Award. He has received numerous best paper awards including the IEEE Communications Society 1998 William Bennett Paper Award.

Quantum information processing is at the threshold of having significant impact on technology and society in the form of providing unbreakable security, ultra-high-precision distributed sensing, and polynomial/exponential speed-ups in computing. Many of these applications are enabled by high rate distributed shared entanglement between pairs and groups of users. A critical missing component that prevents crossing this threshold is a distributed infrastructure in the form of a world-wide “Quantum Internet”. Two quantum network architectures have been proposed: two-way and one-way architectures. A two-way network generates and distributes quantum entanglement to pairs or groups of users whereas a one-way network allows for direct transfer of quantum information from one user to another. We compare these architectures and conclude that a two-way architecture is superior. The two-way architecture appears very different from the classical Internet architecture. However, we will introduce a “connectionless” two-way quantum network architecture that allows one to easily adapt many ideas from classical networks. We provide several examples of the adoption of good ideas and conclude with open research questions.