Quantum repeaters have long been established to be essential for distributing
entanglement over long distances. Consequently, their experimental realization
constitutes a core challenge of quantum communication. However, there are
numerous open questions about implementation details for realistic, near-term
experimental setups. In order to assess the performance of realistic repeater
protocols, we here present ReQuSim, a comprehensive Monte-Carlo based
simulation platform for quantum repeaters that faithfully includes loss and
models a wide range of imperfections such as memories with time-dependent
noise. Our platform allows us to perform an analysis for quantum repeater
setups and strategies that go far beyond known analytic results: This refers to
being able to both capture more realistic noise models and analyse more complex
repeater strategies. We present a number of findings centered around the
combination of strategies for improving performance, such as entanglement
purification and the use of multiple repeater stations, and demonstrate that
there exist complex relationships between them. We stress that numerical tools
such as ours are essential to model complex quantum communication protocols
aimed at contributing to the quantum internet.Comment: 13+4 pages, 10+4 figures, 0+2 tables; v2: updated presentation; v3:
accepted version plus tiny changes, adds one more scenario and runtime
informatio
