Satellite-based Quantum Network: Security and Challenges over Atmospheric Channel

The ultra-secure quantum network leverages quantum cryptography to deliver unsurpassed data transfer security. In principle, the well-known quantum key distribution (QKD) achieves unconditional security, which raises concerns about the trustworthiness of 6G wireless systems in order to mitigate the gap between practice and theory. The long-distance satellite-to-ground evolving quantum network distributes keys that are ubiquitous to the node on the ground through low-orbit satellites. As the secret key sequence is encoded into quantum states, it is sent through the atmosphere via a quantum channel. It still requires more effort in the physical layer design of deployment ranges, transmission, and security to achieve high-quality quantum communication. In this paper, we first review the quantum states and channel properties for satellite-based quantum networks and long-range quantum state transfer (QST). Moreover, we highlight some challenges, such as transmissivity statistics, estimation of channel parameters and attack resilience, quantum state transfer for satellite-based quantum networks, and wavepacket shaping techniques over atmospheric channels. We underline two research directions that consider the QST and wavepacket shaping techniques for atmospheric transmission in order to encourage further research toward the next generation of satellite-based quantum networks.