Project Lead: ORCA
Sector: Telecoms
Project Summary
The project tackles the challenge of resilient multicast routing in optical telecommunications networks, where operators must route increasing traffic demand across existing fibre infrastructure while maintaining resilience, capacity and low latency. The underlying Steiner tree packing problem is a computationally difficult combinatorial optimisation task, making it challenging for classical methods at scale.
The project combines the expertise of ORCA and BT to formulate the problem as a binary optimisation model and solve it using ORCA’s Binary Bosonic Solver (BBS). The approach will be evaluated on simulated systems and on ORCA’s PT-2 photonic quantum processor at the NQCC, with larger-scale testing on the PT-3 photonic quantum processor.
Expected outcomes include a benchmark suite for classically hard routing problems, a telecoms-specific quantum optimisation solver, comparative quantum-versus-classical performance results, and resource estimates showing the pathway to quantum advantage for real-world telecoms network optimisation.
