PhD vacancy in novel beyond 5G mobile network technologies

imec

imec is a world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. The combination of our widely acclaimed leadership in microchip technology and profound software and ICT expertise is what makes us unique. By leveraging our world-class infrastructure and local and global ecosystem of partners across a multitude of industries, we create groundbreaking innovation in application domains such as healthcare, smart cities and mobility, logistics and manufacturing, and energy.

As a trusted partner for companies, start-ups and universities we bring together close to 4000 brilliant minds from over 97 nationalities. Imec is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium and also has distributed R&D groups at a number of Flemish universities, in the Netherlands, Taiwan, USA, China, and offices in India and Japan. All of these particular traits make imec to be a top-class employer.

Ghent University – imec IDLab Research group

The Internet Technology & Data Science Lab (IDLab - https://idlab.technology) is an imec research group at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. IDLab focuses its research on internet technologies and data science. IDLab is a joint research initiative between Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. Bringing together more than 300 internet experts, we develop technologies outperforming current solutions for communication subsystems, high speed and low power networking, distributed computing and multimedia processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and web semantics. IDLab has a unique research infrastructure used in numerous national and international collaborations.

IDLab collaborates with many universities and research centers worldwide and jointly develops advanced technologies with industry (R&D centers from international companies, Flanders’ top innovating large companies and SME’s, as well as numerous ambitious startups).

The IDLab wireless team consists of 30 researchers and has gained profound scientific expertise and knowledge on wireless networking with a prime focus on end-to-end solutions covering all layers in the end-to-end protocol stack. For further development of the IDLab wireless research team in Ghent, we are looking for a PhD candidate in the domain of novel beyond 5G mobile network technologies.

Context

Digital communication plays a pivotal role in both personal and professional environments, supporting persons, machines and things to interact with each other over a communication network. The amount of data being transported is increasing rapidly, posing huge challenges on the underlying communication technologies that are used to support this demanding data traffic. Communication becomes increasingly diverse, more real-time, time-critical and subject to change over time. The past decades, mobile networks were instrumental in the success of providing mobile broadband services to customers worldwide, starting from 2G, 3G and 4G. The next generation mobile networks, named 5G, will expand the mobile ecosystem into new realms, designed to connect virtually everyone and everything, including machines, objects and devices targeting a wide variety of industries, making safer transportation, remote healthcare, precision agriculture, innovative entertainment… 

Today, we are only at the beginning of 5G deployments worldwide, and the true potential of 5G is expected to gradually become a reality in the coming decade. According to the major industrial players, 5G will be a game changer in how we will experience new digital services in our personal and professional life. 

Extrapolating these trends of how networking will evolve over the next 10 years, we expect new mobile networks (5G and beyond) to become extremely programmable and flexible wireless network environments not only at the radio but also the edge and core network level, fully shared by a multitude of services. They support very diverse and demanding traffic types such as connected and autonomous driving vehicles, industrial control loops, real-time audio/video, robots, AR/VR, etc. They work in tight collaboration with end devices to rapidly and automatically adjust operation to meet application requirements and to perform real-time verification of the network performance, thus becoming both flexible and deterministic. Furthermore, continuous seamless mobility, everywhere, every time, will be key in offering the service experience that meets the expectations of the evermore demanding users.

Today, we are far from achieving that vision, requiring significant research efforts to achieve true end-to-end Quality-of-Service guarantees for different application flows and traffic types in diverse professional and private deployments, and to extend current user plane radio level KPIs to application-level end-to-end KPIs.  

You will contribute in filling in this gap, delivering solutions for novel beyond 5G mobile network technologies that stand out in fulfilling, guaranteeing and verifying the challenging requirements of current and future applications running on top.

The job

• Under the supervision of prof. Ingrid Moerman, you will prepare a PhD dissertation by performing novel research in the fields of 5G mobile communication networks and beyond, advanced vehicular networks and/or video distribution over cutting edge mobile network solutions. 
• You publish and present results both at international conferences and in scientific journals.
• You will validate your research by setting up prototyping environments in our lab and considering concrete industrial use cases.
• You tightly collaborate with IDLab colleagues working on 5G technologies, vehicular networking solutions and Software Defined Radio solutions for LTE/5G communication in private deployments.
• You will participate in the framework of national and European funded research projects, and collaborate on a technical level with research partners from industry
•  You will assist in limited educational tasks of the research group.

Job requirements 

• You have (or will receive within a few months) a Masters of Science degree from a European university, preferably in Electronics Engineering, Communications Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent.
• You are interested to do research in an academic environment for a 4 years period in view of a PhD degree 
• You have a keen interest in communication protocol stacks and networks in general, and wireless communication networks in particular.
• You have experience in writing software and prototyping. Knowledge of C, C++ and Linux is a must. In-depth knowledge on building (wireless) communication stacks is an extra asset.
• Having published in high-ranking conferences and journals in the field is an advantage.
• You are well-organized and able to autonomously plan and execute tasks.
• You have strong analytical skills to interpret the obtained research results.
• You are a team player and have strong communication skills.
• Your English is fluent, both speaking and writing.

This PhD position is available immediately and is open until the vacancy is filled 

Apply via https://jobs.idlab.uantwerpen.be/o/phd-vacancy-in-novel-beyond-5g-mobile-network-technologies/c/new

More information
Ingrid Moerman – ingrid.moerman@ugent.be