  We describe a method of investigating the near-term potential of quantum
communication technology for communication networks from the perspective of
current networks. For this, we integrate an instance of the quantum network
simulator QuNetSim at the link layer into the communication network emulator
ComNetsEmu. This novel augmented version of ComNetsEmu is thereby enabled to
run arbitrary quantum protocols between any directly connected pair of network
hosts. To give an example of the proposed method, we implement the link layer
method of generating and storing entanglement while idle, to accelerate data
transmission at later times using superdense coding.
