Harnessing Quantum for Practical Applications

The amount of traffic in communication networks continues to increase. In wireless networks, this requires more efficient usage of limited communication resources. Many radio resource management, resource allocation, and resource sharing problems in wireless communication networks, like in 5G and in 6G, can be formulated as a quadratic or higher order unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO/HUBO) problem. These are combinatorial optimization problems with binary decision variables and, typically, they have a very large search space due to an exponential increase in the possible choices. It is generally expected that quantum computers will be efficient in solving some of the QUBOs, since they are essentially re-formulations of Ising model type problems with quantum adiabatic theorem suggesting quantum computing, hence closely related to physics. Using near term quantum computers to solve QUBOs obtained from wireless communication network problems requires a lot of knowledge and knowhow, starting from physics, quantum computer science, quantum information, and ending with telecommunication engineering. The key success factor in gaining quantum utility or quantum advantage is research collaboration with researchers of these different fields and combining their know-how with a common target: solve QUBO/HUBO formulations of different relevant real-world communication related computation problems with quantum computing.