INFO: Open MSc/PhD positions at UPF, Barcelona, Spain

Call for MSc / PhD students
in the area of wireless communications and multimedia signaling NeTS Research Group (http://nets. upf.edu) 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 signaling and applications, mobile and wireless access networks and the like. There is a necessity to design a new set of integrated signaling 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 (Deadline: 1 May 2008)
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@ 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