Tactile Network Resource Allocation enabled by Quantum Annealing based on ILP Modeling

Agile networks with fast adaptation and reconfiguration capabilities are required for sustainable provisioning of high-quality services with high availability. We propose a new methodical framework for short-time network control based on quantum computing (QC) and integer linear program (ILP) models, which has the potential of realizing a real-time network automation. Finally, we study the approach's feasibility with the state-of-the-art quantum annealer D-Wave Advantage 5.2 in case of an example network and provide scaling estimations for larger networks. We embed network problems in quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) form for networks of up to 6 nodes. We further find annealing parameters that obtain feasible solutions that are close to a reference solution obtained by classical ILP-solver. We estimate, that a real-sized network with 12 to 16 nodes require a quantum annealing (QA) hardware with at least 50000 qubits or more.