Asymmetric adaptive LDPC-based information reconciliation for industrial quantum key distribution

Abstract: We develop a new approach for asymmetric LDPC-based information reconciliation in order to adapt to the current channel state and achieve better performance and scalability in practical resource-constrained QKD systems. The new scheme combines the advantages of LDPC codes, a priori error rate estimation, rate-adaptive and blind information reconciliation techniques. We compare the performance of several asymmetric and symmetric error correction schemes using real industrial QKD setup. The proposed asymmetric algorithm achieves significantly higher throughput, providing a secret key rate very close to the symmetric one in a wide range of error rates. Thus, our approach turns out to be particularly efficient for applications with high key rates, limited classical channel capacity and asymmetric computational resource allocation.