Main supervisor profile and contact: Dr. Xavier Costa-Pérez <xavier.costa@neclab.eu> and Dr. Vincenzo Sciancalepore <vincenzo.sciancalepore@neclab.eu>

Institution: NEC Laboratories Europe

Description of the job: The advertised position refers to a project, in which smart and automated solutions will be designed and developed within the context of Smart Edge. In particular, the work will focus on developing a smart orchestration layer for computational resources among different smart edge platforms including MEC/FOG orchestration techniques. Work objectives are smart orchestration design, analytical modeling and evaluation, research prototypes software development, publications as well as IPR creation.

Mission: 1) To identify state-of-the-art solutions supporting IIoT deployments indicating limitations and challenges when addressing advanced service requirements. 2) To derive a taxonomy of IIoT use cases for next generation networks along with the corresponding derived requirements. 3) To design unsupervised binding affinity models that can profile KPIs and strategically install (or migrate) network functions (or applications) into cloud (or edge) data centres, with the purpose of self-recover of unexpected traffic flows or computational resources shortage. 4) To propose a smart orchestration of IT computational resources among different IT (edge) platforms by performing scaling-up/down/migration operations..

Main functions: 1) Edge-computing resource orchestration strategies to deal with multiple edge computing platforms (belonging to one single or multiple service providers) supporting IIoT services. 2) Demonstration of the lifecycle management of an end-to-end slice comprising FOG workloads (in small cells), MEC workloads (in an edge server), and data-center workloads, connected through an SDN controlled network. 3) Exploitation of real MEC platforms available at NEC laboratories. 4) Publications in top-tier conferences and journals. 4) Patents and integration in product.

Secondments: You will spend a 6 months secondment at i2CAT (Barcelona, Spain) (supervised by Dr. Josep Paradells).

Doctoral programme: The ESR will be enrolled in the University of Paris-Saclay doctoral programme under the joint supervision of Marco Di Renzo (University of Paris-Saclay).

Requirements of the candidate

• Education level: Master degree.

• Degree/speciality: Computer science or telecommunications.

• Language skills: Very good English standards (oral, reading, writing) are required.

• Research experience: Required in at least three of the following areas: 1) Cellular network systems, concepts and architectures, 2) Physical and MAC layer radio access technologies; 3) Mathematical optimization and machine learning; 4) Software development and programming in Python and C/C++; 4) Prototyping with real testbeds and physical propagation devices.

• Other skills: See above.

Apply: Job application form and NEC website with reference [2207-444-6GN]. Please remember to send your application to both websites.