Modeling and Performance Analysis of Free Space Quantum Key Distribution

With the technological development, the demand for secure communication is growing exponentially. Global secure communication have become crucial with increasing number of internet applications. Quantum Cryptography (QC) or Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) in that regime, promises an unconditional security based on laws of quantum principles. Free space QKD allows longer communication distances with practical secure key rates to aid secure global key distribution via satellites. This is encouraging many research groups to conduct QKD experimentation. But it is observed that such experiments are very complex and expensive. This paper thus attempts to establish a model for analysis of free space QKD through simulation. The model will be verified against experimental results available from different literature. It can be seen that the simulation approach stands effective for performance analysis of such complex systems. The developed model, test parameters like quantum bit error rate and secret key rate against mean photon number of laser pulses and quantum channel loss, and proves to fit well with the experimental results.