Quantum key distribution over an encoded repeater chain with sequential swapping

Most current proposals for entanglement distribution networks assume a connection-oriented approach, where resources along a path may be reserved before the start of the session. This strategy, however, does not match the common practice in the existing infrastructure for the Internet, which relies on connectionless packet switching. In our work, we study how a hop-by-hop teleportation can be used to perform entanglement distribution across a network without any prior resource reservation. Specifically, we investigate the attainable secret key generation rate between two users employing this protocol in a repeater chain setup. We analyze this scenario for deterministic quantum repeaters with and without encoding, where we consider a three-qubit repetition code for error detection in the former case. Typical models for the operational errors in these protocols are considered. Our results suggest that the usage of quantum error detection schemes will enable trust-free secret key distribution at distances of interest.