With the rapid development and early industrialization of quantum technologies, it is of great inter- est to analyze their overall energy consumption before planning for their wide-scale deployments. The evaluation of the total energy requirements of quantum networks is a challenging task: different networks require very disparate techniques to create, distribute, manipulate, detect, and process quantum signals. This paper aims to lay the foundations of a framework to model the energy requirements of different quantum technologies and protocols applied to near-term quantum networks. Different figures of merit are discussed and a benchmark on the energy consumption of bipartite and multipartite network proto- cols is presented. An open-source software to estimate the energy consumption of photonic setups is also provided.
With the rapid development and early industrialization of quantum technologies, it is of great inter- est to analyze their overall energy consumption before planning for their wide-scale deployments. The evaluation of the total energy requirements of quantum networks is a challenging task: different networks require very disparate techniques to create, distribute, manipulate, detect, and process quantum signals. This paper aims to lay the foundations of a framework to model the energy requirements of different quantum technologies and protocols applied to near-term quantum networks. Different figures of merit are discussed and a benchmark on the energy consumption of bipartite and multipartite network proto- cols is presented. An open-source software to estimate the energy consumption of photonic setups is also provided.