Entanglement assisted communication complexity measured by distinguishability

Abstract

We investigate the quantum advantage that can arise in typical two-party communication scenarios, where the sender and the receiver are allowed to share prior correlations. Focusing on communication tasks constrained by the distinguishability of the sender's inputs, we demonstrate that entanglement-assisted communication, both classical and quantum, can outperform classical communication supplemented with shared randomness. We begin by developing a general framework for communication tasks with pre-shared correlations. We identify certain communication tasks that exhibit an advantage under entanglement assistance compared to classical communication. Through these results, we establish a connection between quantum communication and entanglement-assisted classical communication, and also show an equivalence between entanglement-assisted classical communication and entanglement-assisted quantum communication. We then consider the simplest scenarios in which the receiver has no input and demonstrate that entanglement-assisted strategies still offer advantages over both classical communication and quantum communication without prior entanglement. Finally, by constructing a class of communication tasks, we show that a non-maximally entangled state can, in some cases, be more useful than a maximally entangled state as a pre-shared resource.