PhD position in Distributed Control for Highly Reliable Communication in Free Space Optical...

We are seeking a motivated candidate to work on this research topic for 4 years full-time at the Pervasive Systems/Design and Analysis of Communication Systems Research groups within the EEMCS faculty at the University of Twente (UT), Enschede, The Netherlands. You may part of your time be located at TNO in The Hague, one of the consortium partners.

The PhD position is embedded in the national research programme FREE: Optical Wireless Superhighways funded by the Dutch Research Council NWO and various industrial parties.

The Optical Wireless Superhighways Research Program
Data generation and consumption have been growing exponentially over the past 50 years pushing traditional technologies to their limits. Future applications, such as high resolution earth observation and 5G, need new paradigms for wireless connectivity. This program will enable such transition by carrying out research into optical free-space communications to replace radio frequencies. Through a single network of networks, that seamlessly integrates satellite and ground-based communications, we foresee 100 fold increase in wireless connectivity on all length scales, offering inherent security and low latency. This program will link user needs to key enabling technologies from photonics, digital and quantum technologies to help developing concrete products and applications for our digital society.

About the Project
Traditional resource allocation in telecommunication networks is based on the scarcity of bandwidth. As such, state of the art techniques are focusing on distributing resources to users so that to satisfy some minimum throughput-latency service requirement. Free space optical (FSO) satellite networks present, however, an extremely large bandwidth. Focus should be on severe throughput reductions or outages due to a rather variable channel which needs to be accurately predicted. This project targets the creation of a proof-of-concept Software Defined Network (SDN) platform with distributed intelligence in order to allow for reliable communication under every sort of uncertain channel. As such, each intelligent agent in the SDN, placed within the satellites themselves will infer the consequence to global behaviour (e.g. network congestion and/or delay) based on local perturbation (e.g. bad channel, mixed traffic requirements) and perform proactive actions (e.g. reroute traffic via different satellite-links).