Passive decoy-state quantum key distribution for the weak coherent photon source with intensity fluctuations

Yuan Li, Wan-su Bao, Hong-wei Li, Chun Zhou, Yang Wang

Published 2013-12-28, updated 2014-01-18Version 2

Passive decoy-state quantum key distribution (QKD) systems, proven to be more desirable than active ones in some scenarios, also have the problem of device imperfections like intensity fluctuations. In this paper the formular of key generation rate of the passive decoy-state protocol using transformed weak coherent pulse (WCP) source with intensity fluctuation is given, and then the influence of intensity fluctuations on the performance of passive decoy-state protocol is rigorously characterized. From numerical simulations, it can be easily seen that intensity fluctuations have unignorable influence on performance of the passive decoy-state QKD protocol with WCP source. Most importantly, our simulations show that, under the same deviation of intensity fluctuations, the passive decoy-state method performs better than the active two-intensity decoy-state method and close to active three-intensity decoy-state method.