PhD position on Sustainable Communications and Computing

Communications and computing infrastructures play a key role in the operation of the modern economy from education to transportation, as they process massive information to make transportation, health, or other systems more efficient and sustainable. However, the growing need for environmental sustainability calls for these vital infrastructures themselves to become more sustainable in their design, deployment, and operation.

• The goal of this PhD project is to design and develop resource management schemes to improve the sustainability of communications and computing infrastructures, e.g., data centers, considering cloud and edge computing, i.e., the cloud-edge continuum. This PhD position is part of MISD project and the candidate will be working in the DACS research group under the supervision of dr. Suzan Bayhan and prof.dr.ir. Geert Heijenk. Moreover, the PhD candidate will be collaborating with other researchers and external partners in the consortium.
• The tentative tasks in the scope of the project are as follows:

• Characterization and design of interfaces among stakeholders (e.g., telco edge, edge providers);
• Application requirement analysis (e.g., new applications emerging with LLMs, telco-functions, XR/VR), models for renewable energy dynamics of different sites;
• Orchestration and (predictive) service placement in the continuum considering e.g., sustainability indicators, carbon intensity, renewable energy resources and PUE of different computing sites, communication network capacity, hardware capabilities (CPU, GPU), sleeping patterns of telco-edge nodes;
• Learning and prediction-based orchestration;
• Performance analysis in simulators and experimentation in a testbed;

Expected starting date: January 2025

Tentative first interview date: September 2024. The 1st (online) meeting for the selected candidates serves as an introduction, where we introduce ourselves to you and you to us. You may be asked to give a short presentation. This will be further explained in the invitation.

Tentative 2nd interview date: October 2024. In the second interview, we will further discuss the job content, your skills, and your talents.