Lossless Address Coding for Quantum Networks

As quantum systems advance toward interconnected architectures, the ability to identify nodes, manage resources, and support network-level functions becomes increasingly critical. Quantum networks differ fundamentally from classical ones: addresses must be represented as quantum states that can be processed coherently, not merely as classical bit strings. This raises a source coding problem—how to assign compact, uniquely decodable, and coherently manipulable address states to nodes in a network whose structure may be hierarchical, with heterogeneous cluster sizes and dynamically configurable address assignments.

Maryopi (2026) addresses this gap by proposing a lossless source coding scheme for addressing in quantum networks. The work establishes a rigorous connection between source coding theory and quantum network design, offering a practical framework toward scalable and coherent quantum addressing. The central objects are a **prefix-suffix address space** and an **isometric hierarchical encoder-decoder** that guarantees unique decodability while preserving the geometry of the address Hilbert space.

The paper reports a numerical example on a **13-node network** to validate the proposed hierarchical encoding scheme. The demonstration shows that the scheme is feasible and achieves **perfect fidelity**, meaning the encoder-decoder round trip recovers the original address information without loss. This is consistent with the lossless nature of the source coding construction: the prefix-suffix address space combined with prefix-free Huffman codewords guarantees unique decodability, and the isometric design ensures that the quantum address states remain coherently processable.

The 13-node example exercises the hierarchical structure, heterogeneous cluster sizes, and configurable address assignment features that the scheme is designed to support. Perfect fidelity in this setting provides evidence that the approach scales to realistic network topologies without sacrificing the coherence properties required for quantum network operations.