Opportunistic Scheduling for Single-downlink Satellite-based Quantum Key Distribution (2512.12514v1)

Abstract: Satellite-based quantum key distribution (QKD), leveraging low photon loss in free-space quantum communication, is widely regarded as one of the most promising directions to achieve global-scale QKD. With a constellation of satellites and a set of ground stations in a satellite-based QKD system, how to schedule satellites to achieve efficient QKD is an important problem. This problem has been studied in the dual-downlink architecture, where each satellite distributes pairs of entanglements to two ground stations simultaneously. However, it has not been studied in the single downlink architecture, where satellites create keys with each individual ground station, and then serve as trusted nodes to create keys between pairs of ground stations. While the single downlink architecture provides weaker security in that the satellites need to be trusted, it has many advantages, including the potential of achieving significantly higher key rates, and generating keys between pairs of ground stations that are far away from each other and cannot be served using the dual-downlink architecture. In this paper, we propose a novel opportunistic approach for satellite scheduling that accounts for fairness among the ground station pairs, while taking advantage of the dynamic satellite channels to maximize the system performance. We evaluate this approach in a wide range of settings and demonstrate that it provides the best tradeoffs in terms of total and minimum key rates across the ground station pairs. Our evaluation also highlights the importance of considering seasonal effects and cloud coverage in evaluating satellite-based QKD systems. In addition, we show different tradeoffs in global and regional QKD systems.