Improvements in communication complexity using quantum entanglement

Quantum computing resources have been known to provide speed-ups in computational complexity in many algorithms. The impact of these resources in communication, however, has not attracted much attention. We investigate the impact of quantum entanglement on communication complexity. We provide a positive result, by presenting a class of multi-party communication problems wherein the presence of a suitable quantum entanglement lowers the classical communication complexity. We show that, in evaluating certains function whose parameters are distributed among various parties, the presence of prior entanglement can help in reducing the required communication. We also present an outline of realizing the required entanglement through optical photon quantum computing. We also suggest the possible impact of our results on network information flow problems, by showing an instance of a lower bound which can be broken by adding limited power to the communication model