A PhD studentship in the Management of Future Information Networks is available, supported through a UCL Impact Scholarship and through the European Union FP7 research projects COMET – Content Mediator Architecture for Content-aware Networks and UniverSelf – Autonomics for Future Networks. Given that there is an award of 3 years home fees and stipend costs, we are looking to recruit a very high calibre home or EU PhD student to work in this emerging area of crucial importance. Note that overseas applicants are NOT eligible.

While the Internet architecture and protocols were originally designed for host-to-host communication, the vast majority of the current Internet interactions address content access or user-user communication. As such, many researchers are currently considering evolutionary and revolutionary new architectures that will better support information-centric operation. The emerging information-centric networking area is currently receiving significant attention worldwide with various different approaches proposed (e.g. CCN, PSIRP’s pub/sub routing, NetInf, etc.) but in all those management of the resulting infrastructure is left open and new management approaches that will enable continuous network optimisation in real-time need to be investigated. To this end, intelligent and adaptive in-network management approaches need to be examined, resulting in self-configuration, self-optimisation, self-healing and self-protection of the future information network.

This area brings together new naming architectures, network-wide content caching, anycast communication, distributed organisation, large-scale distributed monitoring and coordinated decision making. It involves new algorithm and protocol design, modelling, implementation and evaluation. The PhD student will work partly in the context of an existing world-class leading team in the area and will benefit from the relevant ongoing research that will provide a supporting environment and additional stimuli. For more information about the area, you may look at the following keynotes given to the IEEE IM 2011 and Manweek 2009 conferences:

http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~gpavlou/Documents/ICN-IM2011-keynote.pdf

http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~gpavlou/Documents/Autonomic-MEI-Manweek09-keynote.pdf

We are looking for candidates with excellent computer and/or electronic engineering background while strong analytical/mathematical skills will be a significant advantage. Experience of research, design/development and evaluation on networking, network management, ns-2 simulator, Linux, Java, C/C++ or similar would be an advantage.

The studentship is available for three years and covers tuition fees at the UK/EU rate, plus a stipend at c. £15,500 pa (tax free), increasing with inflation. We are looking for the prospective student to start in April 2012. As such, a selection may be made before the closing date of the 30 March 2012.

Applicants must fulfil the normal academic requirements for postgraduate study. In order to accelerate the process, a detailed CV including qualifications, experience and the names of two referees to be potentially contacted together with a one page research statement should be sent by email to Prof. George Pavlou (g.pavlou@ee.ucl.ac.uk) with subject “COMET/USELF studentship”. Selected applicants will be instructed to apply formally through admissions.

Closing Date: 30th March 2012