Unboxing Trustworthiness through Quantum Internet

Abstract

The broad adoption of the Internet of Things during the last decade has widened the application horizons of distributed sensor networks, ranging from smart home appliances to automation, including remote sensing. Typically, these distributed systems are composed of several nodes attached to sensing devices linked by a heterogeneous communication network. The unreliable nature of these systems (e.g., devices might run out of energy or communications might become unavailable) drives practitioners to implement heavyweight fault tolerance mechanisms to identify those untrustworthy nodes that are misbehaving erratically and, thus, ensure that the sensed data from the IoT domain are correct. The overhead in the communication network degrades the overall system, especially in scenarios with limited available bandwidth that are exposed to severely harsh conditions. Quantum Internet might be a promising alternative to minimize traffic congestion and avoid worsening reliability due to the link saturation effect by using a quantum consensus layer. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to explore and simulate the usage of quantum consensus architecture in one of the most challenging natural environments in the world where researchers need a responsive sensor network: the remote sensing of permafrost in Antarctica. More specifically, this paper 1) describes the use case of permafrost remote sensing in Antarctica, 2) proposes the usage of a quantum consensus management plane to reduce the traffic overhead associated with fault tolerance protocols, and 3) discusses, by means of simulation, possible improvements to increase the trustworthiness of a holistic telemetry system by exploiting the complexity reduction offered by the quantum parallelism. Collected insights from this research can be generalized to current and forthcoming IoT environments.