Anonymous collision detection for practical quantum networks

This paper provides a novel protocol based on two-dimensional Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states for anonymously detecting the collision between senders. The proposed protocol is anonymous in the passive, semi-active, and active adversary scenarios, and is able to figure out the number of senders in a practical quantum network. By using Qiskit to implement the proposed protocol with a network of 4 honest agents, it is found that the proposed protocol is of correctness and has higher success probabilities in comparison with the existing two-dimensional-GHZ-state-based protocol under four widely-used types of quantum noise. •A two-dimensional GHZ states-based protocol is proposed to anonymously detect sender collision in practical quantum networks.•The correctness of the proposed protocol is proved, and the senders remain anonymous in three types of adversary scenarios.•The proposed protocol is able to figure out the number of senders in a practical quantum network.•Simulation experiments in Qiskit demonstrate that our protocol has a higher success probability than the existing protocol.