  Long-distance quantum communication presents a significant challenge as
maintaining the fidelity of qubits can be difficult. This issue can be
addressed through the use of quantum repeaters to transmit entanglement
information through Bell measurements. However, despite its necessity to enable
wide-area quantum internet, the deployment cost of quantum repeaters can be
prohibitively expensive, thus it is important to develop a quantum repeater
deployment model that can strike a balance between cost and effectiveness. In
this work, we present novel heuristic models to quickly determine a minimum
number of quantum repeaters to deploy in large-scale networks to provide
end-to-end connectivity between all end hosts. The results show that, compared
to the linear programming approach, the heuristic methods can find near-optimal
solutions while reducing the execution time from days to seconds when evaluated
against several synthetic and real-world networks such as SURFnet and ESnet. As
reliability is key for any network, we also demonstrate that the heuristic
method can determine deployment models that can endure up to two link/node
failures.
