Call for MSc / PhD students
in the area of wireless communications and multimedia signalling
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 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 (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