We present a strategy to generate long-range entanglement in noisy quantum
networks. We consider a cubic lattice whose bonds are partially entangled mixed
states of two qubits, and where quantum operations can be applied perfectly at
the nodes. In contrast to protocols designed for one- or two-dimensional
regular lattices, we find that entanglement can be created between arbitrarily
distant qubits if the fidelity of the bonds is higher than a critical value,
independent of the system size. Therefore, we show that a constant overhead of
local resources, together with connections of finite fidelity, is sufficient to
achieve long-distance quantum communication in noisy networks.Comment: published versio