PhD in Network Infrastructures

3/30703
label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Cristian Ion
The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) is known worldwide for its high academic quality and the social relevance of its research programmes. The faculty’s excellent facilities accentuate its international position in teaching and research.

The faculty offers an interdisciplinary setting for its 500 employees, 350 PhD students and 1700 undergraduates. Together they work on a broad range of technical innovations in the fields of sustainable energy, telecommunications, microelectronics, embedded systems, computer and software engineering, interactive multimedia and applied mathematics. EEMCS: Your Connection to the Future.



Job description

Network infrastructures are becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to: a) the complexity in configuring many devices and mechanisms, b) an increase in (large data) applications that demand Quality of Service (QoS) and careful traffic engineering to avoid network congestion, and c) equipment inter-vendor inoperability. In Software Defined Networking (SDN), the aim is to solve these issues by decoupling the control plane from the forwarding plane and introducing a centralised controller that monitors the network and configures the router forwarding planes by assigning paths to data flows.

Since a centralised controller is used, it could - through proper network monitoring - obtain a good view of the network and its QoS parameters, which opens the door to new ways for dynamically calculating paths and offering tailor-made service, but also allowing quicker reactions to security risks and network failures. However, the centralised nature of the SDN architecture raises scalability concerns. This PhD project will focus on a) design rules for an efficient, survivable, and scalable SDN network, b) the development of QoS algorithms for an SDN network, c) experiments with the developed tools on an SDN testbed, and d) inter-domain SDN operability.