  Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a promising technique for secure
communication based on quantum mechanical principles. To improve the secure key
rate of a QKD system, most studies on reconciliation primarily focused on
improving the efficiency. With the increasing performance of QKD systems, the
research priority has shifted to the improvement of both throughput and
efficiency. In this paper, we propose a high performance solution of Cascade
reconciliation, including a high-throughput-oriented framework and an
integrated-optimization-oriented scheme. Benefiting from the fully utilizing
computation and storage resources, effectively dealing with communication
delays, the integrated-optimization-oriented parameters setting, etc., an
excellent overall performance was achieved. Experimental results showed that,
the throughput of up to 570Mbps with an efficiency of 1.038 was achieved,
which, to our knowledge, was more than four times faster than any throughput
previously demonstrated. Furthermore, throughputs on real data sets were
capable of reaching up to 86Mbps even on embedded platforms. Additionally, our
solution offers good adaptability to the fluctuating communication delay and
quantum bit error rate (QBER). Based on our study, low performance (i.e. low
power-consumption and cost-effective) CPU platforms will be sufficient for
reconciliation in the existing and near-term QKD systems.
