Practical issues in decoy-state quantum key distribution based on the central limit theorem

Abstract: Decoy-state quantum key distribution is a standard tool for long-distance quantum communications. An important issue in this field is processing the decoy-state statistics taking into account statistical fluctuations (or "finite-key effects"). In this work, we propose and analyze an option for decoy statistics processing, which is based on the central limit theorem. We discuss such practical issues as an inclusion of the failure probability of the decoy-states statistical estimates in the total failure probability of a QKD protocol and also taking into account the deviations of the binomially distributed random variables used in the estimations from the Gaussian distribution. The results of numerical simulations show that the obtained estimations are quite tight. The proposed technique can be used as a part of post-processing procedures for industrial quantum key distribution systems.