Quantum communications bring a paradigm change in internet security by using
quantum resources to establish secure keys between parties. Present-day quantum
communications networks are mainly point-to-point and use trusted nodes and key
management systems to relay the keys. Future quantum networks, including the
quantum internet, will have complex topologies in which groups of users are
connected and communicate with each-other. Here we investigate several
architectures for quantum communication networks. We show that photonic orbital
angular momentum (OAM) can be used to route quantum information between
different nodes. Starting from a simple, point-to-point network, we will
gradually develop more complex architectures: point-to-multipoint,
fully-connected and entanglement-distribution networks. As a particularly
important result, we show that an n-node, fully-connected network can be
constructed with a single OAM sorter and n−1 OAM values. Our results pave the
way to construct complex quantum communication networks with minimal resources.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure