A submission to the 24-hour Amazon Braket challenge for QC Hack 2022: Quantum Optimization of the Helium Network for the Denver Area
Helium is a blockchain for low power IoT devices, allowing communication over long distances. It is a decentralized wireless connectivity platform that could be used for emergency communications if the electricity went out and took out both the internet as well as cellular services. This could happen either due to natural disasters or conflict situations (i.e. Ukraine).
The goal of this submission was to divide the HNT network into 5 communities that were closely bound together, to offer redundancy in the network if for example a large portion of the network were to go down.
A Delaunay triangulation was used to form the graph connecting the hotspots, but in reality other measures could be used, such as how many transactions were passed between the hotspots per day.
Below is a map of the Helium hotspots in the Denver area. This is a global network.
And below is more of a closeup of the data.
A QUBO representation was used and deployed in hybrid fashion on the D-Wave Advantage QPU through Amazon Braket. It yielded an improved modularity result (0.44691752481705127) over the classical implementation (0.46611572091086173).
The community breakdown into 5 subcommunities is shown below.
Load the Jupyter Notebook and the src folder into Amazon Braket and run all the cells. That's it! The output will go into the Output folder and will also display in the notebook.