MSc/PhD Wireless Communications & Multimedia Signalling

Call for MSc / PhD students in the area of wireless communications and
multimedia signalling NeTS Research Group Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Barcelona, Spain
NeTS is looking for students coming from renowned universities from
around the world, with a very good grade record, who have a very high
interest in wireless communications, specially those based on the IEEE
802.11 principles, including sensor, adhoc, infrastructure WLANs and
mesh networks. We are also looking for students passionate about
multimedia communications in the Internet, and the protocols
associated to it. We seek students with a strong background on
communications networks, coming from electrical engineering, computer
science or related fields. Paramount is a desire to learn and push the
limits of current technology, as well as providing new insight into
today's and tomorrow's networks and services.
The accepted candidates will participate in several projects in tight
cooperation with other researchers from our group. Positions available
are:

1 PhD / MSc position in "Reconfigurable, adaptive and selforganized
sensor networks". Sensor networks are formed by small, inexpensive and
resource limited devices that can interact with the environment
(sensing or actuating) and communicate wirelessly with other devices.
The work will consist in the design and implementation of a complete
new protocol stack based on collaborative and crosslayer techniques,
including power control routing algorithms, reconfigurable PHY/MAC
protocols and adaptive self organized multihop clustering algorithms.
1 PhD / MSc position in "Modeling adaptive traffic flows over capacity
varying wireless mesh networks". Current WLANs suffer from various
impairments which reduce their ability to carry multimedia flows
satisfactorily. One of them is the intrinsic variable capacity due to
the multiple transmission rates used and caused by the distributed
random access to the channel. The proposed thesis will consider the
definition of a mathematical framework to analyze multichannel
wireless mesh networks, based on the IEEE 802.11s/n prestandard, in
order to optimize the QoS and signalling mechanisms (e.g. based on P2P
paradigms) to adapt properly the multimedia traffic sources (such as
VoIP, video streaming).

1 PhD / MSc position in "Next Generation Multimedia Signalling for the
multitechnology, multiservice Internet". The Internet is undergoing a
dramatic evolution through new architectural paradigms, like the NGNs,
P2Pbased signalling and applications, mobile and wireless access
networks and the like. There is a necessity to design a new set of
integrated signalling protocols, which permit to control the
transmission of multimedia traffic over such heterogeneous networks.
IMS is the current best practice in that area, but its many
shortcomings and high complexity suggest to explore new approaches
that go beyond IMS, like P2PSIP based systems. The goal of this PhD,
thus, is to design, evaluate and standardize new signalling protocols
for the Internet of the future. We offer a three year grant to PhD
students with a MSc already finished. Moreover, for students without a
MsC a four year grant is also possible with the requirement to follow
our master program during the first year.

How to apply
Please send your full CV, together with your student record (as
appropriate) and a cover letter stating your interests and goals to:
Dr. Miquel Oliver: miquel.oliver[a-t]upf.edu
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF),
Edifici Estació França, Passeig de la Circumval∙lació, 8. Postal
code: 08003 Barcelona (Spain).
Tel: 93 542 24 51 Fax: 93 542 25 17
Deadline: 1 May 2008