Advantage of fully reactive entanglement-swapping policies

Investigate whether the additional network-state awareness of fully reactive entanglement-swapping policies provides an advantage that outweighs the classical signaling delays required to exploit that information.

Background

The paper distinguishes non-reactive policies, which follow a predefined sequence of entanglement-generation and entanglement-swapping operations, from reactive policies, which adapt their operations to the real-time state of the repeater network. Although reactive policies have more current network information, exploiting that information requires additional classical signaling, which introduces delays and causes further memory decoherence. The paper therefore restricts its analysis to policies that are reactive during elementary-link generation but non-reactive during entanglement swapping, leaving the comparative benefit of fully reactive strategies unresolved.