Secure sequential transmission of quantum information

Abstract: We propose a quantum communication protocol that can be used to transmit any quantum state, one party to another via several intermediate nodes, securely on quantum communication network. The scheme makes use of the sequentially chained and approximate version of private quantum channels satisfying certain commutation relation of $n$-qubit Pauli operations. In this paper, we study the sequential structure, security analysis, and efficiency of the quantum sequential transmission (QST) protocol in depth.