Measurement-Device Placement in MDI-QKD Networks with Minimal Trusted Relays

Tianqu Luo; Ibrahim Arslantas; Sezin Ozturk; Qiaolun Zhang; Alberto Sebastián-Lombraña; Mehdi Bolourian; Jiaheng Xiong; Francesco Musumeci; Vicente Martín; Raouf Boutaba; Massimo Tornatore

arXiv · 2609.06603

Measurement-Device Placement in MDI-QKD Networks with Minimal Trusted Relays

Tianqu Luo·Ibrahim Arslantas·Sezin Ozturk·Qiaolun Zhang·Alberto Sebastián-Lombraña·Mehdi Bolourian·Jiaheng Xiong·Francesco Musumeci·Vicente Martín·Raouf Boutaba·Massimo Tornatore

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Abstract

Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution (MDI-QKD) removes detector side-channel vulnerabilities by delegating measurements to an untrusted relay that, when shared by several user pairs, acts as a Bell-state measurement (BSM) hub. Channel loss still limits the reach of MDI-QKD links, so long-range services rely on trusted relays for key forwarding. As MDI-QKD moves toward metropolitan deployment, a key network-planning question arises: how should BSM hubs be placed on existing fiber infrastructure to minimize the use of trusted relays? In this work, we formalize this challenge as the MDI-QKD Hub Deployment (MHD) problem. We first prove that the MHD problem is NP-hard, and then formulate it as a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formulation for MDI-QKD network planning that captures the structural features specific to MDI-QKD, namely a shared BSM hub, two-link user-to-hub routing, and loss-balancing constraints, while jointly determining hub placement, user-to-hub assignment, and trusted-relay demand allocation. Our solution accounts for realistic budget and capacity constraints, including practical insights from real-world deployments of commercial MDI-QKD solutions. Numerical evaluations on three metropolitan topologies (12 to 50 nodes) at realistic geographic distances show that topology structure governs trusted-relay demand: hub placement alone eliminates all trusted relays in compact urban meshes, while in sparse topologies, relaxing the loss-balancing constraint removes the dominant source of trusted-relay usage at no additional infrastructure cost. The key-rate threshold at which trusted relays first appear shifts monotonically with the network diameter, i.e., the largest shortest-path distance between any node pair in fiber kilometers, delineating the feasibility boundary of pure MDI-QKD deployment.

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Tianqu Luo, Ibrahim Arslantas, Sezin Ozturk, Qiaolun Zhang, Alberto Sebastián-Lombraña, Mehdi Bolourian, Jiaheng Xiong, Francesco Musumeci, Vicente Martín, Raouf Boutaba, Massimo Tornatore. 2026-09-10. Measurement-Device Placement in MDI-QKD Networks with Minimal Trusted Relays. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06603

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