A Survey on AI-Enabled Network Protocols for Quantum-Resilient Communication
Bareera Anam, Muhammad Asim, Muhammad Nadeem Ali, Byung-Seo Kim*
Department of Software and Communications Engineering, Hongik University, Sejong Campus, Sejong-si, Republic of Korea
* Corresponding Author: Byung-Seo Kim. Email: 
Computers, Materials & Continua https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.084949
Received 02 May 2026; Accepted 07 July 2026; Published online 03 August 2026
Abstract
The rapid evolution of communication networks, driven by the expansion of heterogeneous environments such as 6G, Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, has exposed a critical research gap in the lack of unified frameworks that jointly address intelligent network control and quantum-resilient security. Existing networking protocols were originally designed under static configurations and classical security assumptions, making them increasingly inadequate for dynamic, large-scale, and intelligent infrastructures exposed to quantum-enabled threats. At the same time, the emergence of Quantum Computing (QC) introduces severe security risks, as widely used cryptographic mechanisms supporting protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) become vulnerable to quantum attacks. This paper presents a structured survey based on a systematic classification of recent literature across AI-enabled networking, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), and protocol-level integration approaches. The review categorizes existing works into AI-driven network optimization, quantum-resilient security mechanisms, and hybrid AI–QRC architectural frameworks, enabling a unified comparison of design strategies and deployment models. Furthermore, this survey analyzes how Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques enable autonomous network operations while Quantum-Resilient Cryptography (QRC) approaches provide post-quantum security guarantees, highlighting their complementary roles in next-generation network design. The study further synthesizes key findings for a tightly coupled AI–QRC co-design, which remains an open challenge due to mismatched assumptions in control latency, cryptographic overhead, and protocol adaptability. Additionally, this review emphasizes the need for integrated frameworks that combine intelligence and quantum security to develop adaptive, scalable, and resilient network protocols for the post-quantum era.
Keywords
Artificial intelligence; quantum-resilient communication; post-quantum cryptography; network protocols; autonomous networks; quantum Internet; secure networking; reinforcement learning; TLS; QKD
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