Investigating delay of the media access control protocols for IoT-RoF using quantum entanglement

One of the significant challenges of the Radio over fibre (RoF) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the propagation delay. This delay can lead to serious issues, such as higher propagation delay resulting in collisions and unnecessary retransmissions. Quantum entanglement is an excellent candidate to overcome the propagation delay of the RoF MAC protocol. A new quantum MAC protocol is proposed, named the Quantum Entanglement-based MAC protocol (QE-MAC), in which Quantum Teleportation is utilised to address the propagation delay. Four entanglement states are employed to represent the control packets of the classical MAC protocol, and data is transmitted over the classical channel. Instead of using control packets such as acknowledgement, request to send, and Clear to send, state transitions are employed. This approach avoids the delay and collision issues associated with control packets, resulting in a significant improvement in network performance. The delay, duty cycle (DC), and power consumption of the proposed QE-MAC protocol are formulated and derived. The protocol is evaluated in terms of delay, DC, and power consumption, demonstrating superior performance compared to the classical RoF MAC protocol. In comparison to published works, our proposed approach has successfully reduced both delay and power consumption by 35%.