PhD Student
Job description
PhD Researcher for next-generation WiFi chip design on Software-Defined Radio
About Ghent University
Ghent University is a world of its own. Employing more than 15.000 people, it is actively involved in education and research, management and administration, as well as technical and social service provision on a daily basis. It is one of the largest, most exciting employers in the area and offers great career opportunities.
With its 11 faculties and more than 85 departments offering state-of-the-art study programmes grounded in research in a wide range of academic fields, Ghent University is a logical choice for its staff and students.
About IDLab
The IDLab Ghent research group is seeking a highly motivated and talented PhD student to join the Software-Defined Radio (SDR) research team. Digital communication plays a pivotal role in professional environments, supporting both persons, machines to interact with each other over a communication network. In professional environments, such as industry automation (industry 4.0), communication becomes increasingly diverse, and demands more reliable and time-critical end-to-end wireless connectivity, that can seamlessly adapt to dynamic environments and application needs. What is also lacking in today’s wireless network is uniform coverage, users often rely on connection to a specific access point, and performance varies when moving around. The next generation Wi-Fi needs to support distributed and coordinated AP architectures, whereby multiple APs can simultaneously serve a single user with coherent beamforming. In short, we want to advance wireless communications to the next level on these aspects: uniform coverage, end-to-end latency, time synchronization accuracy among distributed applications across diverse network segments, reliability/QoS for high-priority and safety-critical traffic. Today, we are far from achieving that vision, as most research is limited to theoretical or simulation studies, ignoring real-world impairments. Individual access points produced by different vendors rarely cooperate, features such as coherent beamforming among different access points have great potential but cannot be realized in real-life.
In recent years, software-defined radio becomes a popular tool in research community, the SDR team of UGent has created the full stack open-source Wi-Fi chip design openwifi (https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi). Many innovations has been built above openwifi, such as support of synchronization and Time Sensitive Network (TSN), MIMO diversity, for a complete list of publications using openwifi please refer to (https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi/blob/master/doc/publications.md).
This PhD vacancy targets to use openwifi to deliver solutions of the advanced WiFi chip for professional end-to-end communication networks that stand out in fulfilling, guaranteeing the challenging requirements of ultra-reliable and time-and-safety-critical applications running on top.
We offer the opportunity to do this research in an international and stimulating environment. The IDLab research group belongs to both Ghent university and IMEC. Ghent University consistently ranks among the best 100 universities in the world. And IMEC is world’s leading independent R&D research hub. Our research center is located in the heart of Europe, Ghent is a beautiful and welcoming city (https://www.lonelyplanet.com/articles/ghent-belgiums-best-kept-secret) with plenty of cultural and leisure activities.
The selected candidate will be offered a 4-year employment, with an intermediate evaluation after the first year (1+3 years). The salary is competitive and will be determined by the university salary scales. In addition, staff members can count on a number of benefits, such as a broad range of training and educational opportunities, 36 days of vacation leave, bicycle allowance, and more.
Job profile
In general, under the supervision of prof. Ingrid Moerman, you will prepare a PhD dissertation on implementation of advanced WiFi chips for professional applications: end-to-end oriented efficient software-hardware co-design towards reliable and low-latency solutions in professional environments. We are seeking a PhD candidate to enhance the next generation wireless chip design upon openwifi, with the following requirements:
During the PhD study, you will likely carry out some of the following tasks:
Offer
How to apply
Send your application by email to Prof. Ingrid.Moerman (Ingrid.moerman@ugent.be), dr. Xianjun Jiao (xianjun.jiao@ugent.be) and dr. Wei Liu (wei.liu@ugent.be ). Applications should include
After a first screening, selected candidates will be invited for an interview (also possible via Teams)
Application deadline: continuous evaluation until the vacancy is filled.
Last application date
Feb 15, 2025 00:00
Department
TW05 - Department of Information Technology
Contract
Limited duration
Degree
Master's degree in computer science, or electronic engineering, or equivalent.
Occupancy rate
100%
Vacancy type
Research staff
Academic Europe, the European career network for Academics, Researchers and Scientists