ABSTRACT Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks operating in mission‐critical and contested environments must sustain communication despite intermittent connectivity, finite buffers and deliberate jamming. This paper presents a cross‐layer framework that integrates a deterministic adaptive decision (AD) mechanism, delay‐tolerant networking (DTN) and context‐aware post‐quantum cryptography (PQC). The AD mechanism ranks feasible relays using link reliability, destination progress, service delay and relay congestion; positive‐progress relays are preferred, whereas limited nonprogress forwarding is retained only as a DTN fallback. The framework is evaluated against HF‐Direct, HF‐DTN, HF‐AD and HF‐PQC using common mobility, traffic, jammer and random‐seed realisations with a strict 60‐s end‐to‐end deadline. The results expose a deliberate resilience–security trade‐off rather than universal metric dominance. The proposed method maintains 100% policy compliance among successful deliveries and invokes PQC on 63.9% of delivered packets overall, and its mission‐success degradation with increasing jamming is smaller than that of the HF‐DTN, HF‐AD and HF‐PQC multihop baselines. A 10–50 UAV density‐and‐load stress test and a payload‐expansion analysis further quantify scalability and PQC communication overhead. These results support coordinated forwarding, disruption tolerance and selective post‐quantum protection for contested UAV communication.
ABSTRACT This manuscript focuses on the study of optimal quantum control problem for the quantum stochastic model in noncommutative space. The existence and uniqueness of the quantum stochastic differential equation driven by a fermion Brownian motion with bounded delay in finite time interval are established by employing the noncommutative Burkholder–Gundy inequality, generalised Minkowski inequality and generalised Banach fixed‐point theorem. The proposed system is formulated to control the quantum stochastic differential equation and to maximise the probability that the quantum state will reach the target state. By using the Pontryagin maximum principle, optimal quantum control theory is established for the proposed system. Furthermore, an application of the algorithm is presented through numerical simulations which validate the theoretical results.
ABSTRACT Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a key‐sharing technology with information‐theoretic security. Its security does not depend on computational complexity, and is considered one of the methods for achieving post‐quantum secure communication. This opinion reviews the main applications of QKD technology in China and introduces progress in standardisation. These developments can provide reference experiences for the global practical application of QKD.
ABSTRACT This paper presents a cybersecure hybrid quantum–classical architecture for synchronising distributed quantum neural networks (QNNs) in 6G holographic communications. The proposed framework targets secure, low‐latency and high‐fidelity end‐to‐end operation under realistic noise and adversarial conditions. Multipartite Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) entanglement supports gradient‐consensus synchronisation, regularised by von Neumann entropy and trace distance. Holographic tensor teleportation is executed over reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)‐assisted midhaul links protected by quantum key distribution (QKD). Joint optimisation of QNN parameters and RIS phases targets high end‐to‐end fidelity under noise. Qiskit simulations averaged over 100 trials achieve , and , with 22.5 ms end‐to‐end latency. Compared with reduced baselines without GHZ synchronisation or without RIS control, fidelity improves by 20%–28% and synchronisation divergence decreases by about 90%. Scalability, security stress scenarios, classical‐feedback impairments, hyperparameter sensitivity and noisy intermediate‐scale quantum (NISQ)‐oriented error mitigation are all evaluated. The architecture scales gracefully to distributed units with only 7% fidelity reduction, whereas mitigation improves fidelity by 7%–11% under moderate noise. Overall, the RIS‐QKD‐GHZ integration enables secure, low‐latency and scalable quantum–classical 6G networking.
ABSTRACT Software‐defined networking (SDN) consolidates network control at a centralised controller, making the southbound TLS‐protected channel between the controller and OpenFlow switches the principal security boundary of the entire network. Classical public‐key mechanisms underpinning this channel—RSA, ECDHE and X.509 certificate infrastructure—are fundamentally threatened by Shor's algorithm, which solves their underlying hard problems in polynomial quantum time. This paper presents the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a key management system (KMS) serving as the central trust anchor in a fully quantum key distribution (QKD)‐integrated SDN architecture. We formally characterise the KMS's two interdependent roles: (i) a topology role , mediating all BB84‐derived quantum key material to every OpenFlow switch while enforcing hierarchical role‐based access control (RBAC) and maintaining three distinct key‐type domains; and (ii) a security role , operating a formally specified four‐state lifecycle state machine with pre‐emptive refresh that eliminates cryptographic downtime, AES‐256‐GCM key storage backed by a software keystore (extensible to HSM/TPM in production deployments) and a tamper‐protected audit subsystem. The system is implemented entirely in Python 3.10 on the Ryu 4.34 SDN framework with Open vSwitch 2.17 and evaluated in a two‐tier Mininet testbed comprising 12 OpenFlow switches, 24 hosts and dual redundant controllers. Over 30 statistically independent trials, full key synchronisation completes in 1.72 s for 12 switches at a sustained rate of 20.9 keys/s ( ≈ 144 ms per switch); automatic key refresh incurs a bounded transient CPU spike from 22% to 37%, resolving within 15 s; and dual‐controller failover mediated by the KMS completes in 1.17 s on average with zero standing packet loss. Total performance overhead relative to classical RSA + TLS is 19%–33% across all measured metrics, establishing the practical deployability of the proposed KMS architecture for quantum‐safe SDN control planes.
