  Quantum repeaters (QRs) provide a way of enabling long distance quantum
communication by establishing entangled qubits between remote locations. We
investigate a new approach to QRs in which quantum information can be
faithfully transmitted via a noisy channel without the use of long distance
teleportation, thus eliminating the need to establish remote entangled links.
Our approach makes use of small encoding blocks to fault-tolerantly correct
both operational and photon loss errors. We describe a way to optimize the
resource requirement for these QRs with the aim of the generation of a secure
key. Numerical calculations indicate that the number of quantum memory bits
required for our scheme has favorable poly-logarithmic scaling with the
distance across which the communication is desired.
