AUTO-ADAPTIVE INTERVAL SELECTION ALGORITHM FOR QUANTUM KEY DISTRIBUTION

Key reconciliation plays an important role in quantum key distribution, as well as shared bit string distillation. To distill efficiently the final key a so-called Winnow protocol has been proposed. However, how to choose the interval length of the shared string to maximize the Winnow efficiency is difficult in practical program processing. Because the interval choice remains an open problem the key rate of the Winnow protocol is not as high as the one calculated in theory. Consequently, the Winnow protocol is difficult to efficiently employ in application. In this paper we first analytically investigate the dependence of the interval length on the error distribution and the code. Then ail auto-adaptive interval selection algorithm is proposed. In addition, new characteristics of the protocol are investigated.