The IDLab wireless research team in Ghent is looking for a PhD candidate in the domain of deterministic low-latency wireless communication.

PhD Student

Last application dateJun 30, 2022 00:00DepartmentTW05 – Department of Information TechnologyContractLimited durationDegreeMasters of Science degree, preferably from a European university, in Electronics Engineering, Communications Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent.Occupancy rate100%Vacancy typeResearch staff

Job description

PhD vacancy in deterministic low-latency wireless communication
Job description
IMEC
imec is the 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 3,500 brilliant minds from over 70 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 & Data 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 and across heterogeneous wired/wireless networks. For further development of the IDLab wireless research team in Ghent, we are looking for a PhD candidate in the domain of deterministic low-latency wireless communication.

Context
Time-Sensitive Networking can meet the demanding requirements of applications in industry automation, audio/video communication, mission-critical communication and other professional environments. But so far, its usage is restricted to wired networks only. 5G Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication strives to fill in this gap, but also Wi-Fi is an interesting candidate. In IDLab, we work on extending Wi-Fi with time-sensitve networking features, where we have already demonstrated microseconds time-synchronisation accuracy and milliseconds end-to-end latency. We design new strategies to perform real-time and fine-grained verification of the end-to-end network performance and create tighter interactions between the applications and the network. For this, we build on top of openwifi, the world’s first open-source Wi-Fi implementation that has been developed within the team.
As a PhD researcher, you will join the deterministic low-latency wireless communication team and participate in a variety of research projects on this topic. This ranges from the design of reliable and latency-bounded communication for real-time audio streaming applications in private professional environments to high-speed low-latency communication in mmWave Wi-Fi mesh networks.

The job

• Under the supervision of prof. Jeroen Hoebeke and prof. Ingrid Moerman, you will conduct high-quality research on deterministic low-latency wireless communication.
• You will validate your research by setting up prototyping environments in lab/field and considering concrete industrial use cases.
• You will write technical reports on the developed solutions, implementation, and experiments and publish findings both at international conferences and in scientific journals.
• You tightly collaborate with IDLab colleagues working on Software Defined Radio solutions for time-sensitive communication (IDLab’s openwifi platform – https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi).
• You will participate in the framework of national and European research projects, and collaborate on a technical level with research partners from industry and academia
• You will assist in limited educational tasks of the research group (at most 5% of your responsibilities).

Job profile

Offer

• Become part of a dynamic, multicultural team working on exciting new technologies
• Contract with duration of 1 year, automatically extended with 3 years upon positive evaluation
• Minimum net salary of 2100 EUR per month (no prior working experience)

Job requirements

• You have (or will receive within a few months) a Masters of Science degree, preferably from a European university, 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 solid knowledge of 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.
• 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.
  

How to apply

How to apply

• Please apply via: https://jobs.idlab.uantwerpen.be/o/phd-vacancy-in-deterministic-lowlatency-wireless-communication/c/new . Applications sent to us via email will not be considered.
• More information about the PhD topic: jeroen.hoebeke@ugent.be