Quantum conference key agreement (CKA) is useful for many applications that involve secure communication or collaboration among multiple parties. While CKA over quantum networks can be achieved using pairwise quantum key distribution, a more efficient approach is to establish keys among the parties directly through multipartite entanglement distribution. Existing studies on multipartite entanglement distribution, however, are not designed for CKA, and hence do not aim to optimize key rate. In this paper, we first develop an efficient 3-party CKA strategy based on a closed-form expression that we derive for estimating errors. We then develop a general strategy for N-party CKA that accounts for estimated key rates on individual network paths. For both cases, we use multipath routing to improve key rate. We evaluate our approach in a wide range of settings and demonstrate that it achieves high key rate and degrades gracefully when increasing the number of parties.

Execution of quantum network applications requires a software stack for nodes. Recently, the first designs and demonstrations have been proposed for such software stacks, including QNodeOS and its extension, Qoala. The latter enables compilation strategies previously not possible in QNodeOS. Here, we show how the extensions provided by Qoala can be used by a compiler to improve the performance of quantum network applications. We define new compilation strategies that allow the compiler to influence the scheduling and execution of quantum programs on a quantum network node. Through simulation, we demonstrate that our compilation strategies can reduce the execution time by up to 29.53% and increase the success probability by up to 25.12%. Our work highlights the potential of compiler optimizations for quantum network programs.