Fig. 6: Performance of various quasi-local policies with distillation.

Comparison of average waiting times (a) and average age of the end-to-end link (b) for the FN SWAP-ASAP policy with and without distillation. For the average waiting time, DISTILL-SWAP outperforms the policy without distillation for low elementary link success probabilities, but it is not useful to distill when the success probability is high. At the same time, we see that it is never useful to SWAP-DISTILL, both in terms of the average waiting time and the age of the end-to-end link. The CC costs of distillation are much higher when long virtual links are distilled, which provides intuition for the inefficacy of the SWAP-DISTILL policy. Average waiting times (c) and average age of end-to-end link (d) for the DISTILL-SWAP versions of FN SWAP-ASAP, SN SWAP-ASAP and the SN DOUBLING policies when classical communication costs are included. FN SWAP-ASAP is the best policy for reducing the average waiting time and SN SWAP-ASAP for average age of the youngest end-to-end link.