At the
Advanced Networking Lab of the
Center for Wireless Technology Eindhoven (CWTe) of the EE Department of TU/e we have several open PhD positions on ultra-reliable wireless communications for mission critical applications in aerospace.
The Advanced Networking Lab is a member of CWTe which is part of the TU/e, Department of Electrical Engineering. Researchers from the groups Electromagnetic, Integrated Circuits, Signal Processing Systems, Optical Communication, and Electronic Systems, work together to address research questions across these research areas from the wireless channel through various layers of the communication stack (
www.tue.nl/cwte).
The ANL is currently involved in many beyond-5G/6G R&D projects funded by the European commission and Dutch government. Our key research areas include ultra-reliable low latency communications, resource allocation, digital twins and Open RAN for 6G networks, distributed massive MIMO, flexible compute continuum for 6G RAN open architectures. A substantial part of our research is dedicated to explore the feasibility of wireless communications to replace the existing wired avionic networks onboard aircraft. Research activities in this domain are supported through the active R&D projects RHIADA and Luchtvaart in transitie (LiT) or Aviation in Transition (in English). The laboratory facilities include fully opensource OpenRAN-compliant 5G testbed with commercial radio units (RUs) and software-defined radios, a fully shielded metal room in which the most sensitive electronics can be measured, a 28 m2 anechoic chamber (500MHz-40GHz), system integration lab where chips can be linked to other components, and a 16-channel distributed MIMO testbed (sub-6 GHz).
The PhD positions, are funded by the Dutch National Growth Fund project '
Aviation in Transition (LiT)' involving the Dutch aerospace industry and research organizations. In the case of avionics, the most important advantages of wireless systems are weight reduction and flexibility, resulting in less fuel consumption, ease of layout, upgradation/modification, service and maintenance. One of the aims of the project is to develop advanced technologies for wireless avionics intra-communication (WAIC). The PhD positions aim to investigate different techniques to guarantee high levels of reliability in private wireless network deployments in harsh environmental conditions, comprising robustness for interference, failure and attacks, along with high levels of availability, flexibility, in addition to dealing with stringent latency constraints. The PhD candidates will work on the design and evaluation of end-to-end WAIC networks including the control and data planes, considering various wireless architectures. Ultra-high reliability and strict latency constraints being the primary design objectives, the candidate is expected to explore advanced wireless techniques/methods proposed for beyond-5G/6G communications. Besides making use of well-known diversity techniques at the physical layer such as channel coding and multiple antennas, the projects will also investigate diversity techniques at the link and network layers including time-sensitive networking (TSN) standards.
Some important domains that we want to investigate are diversity techniques at all levels including architecture, and techniques to detect, localize, analyze and predict connectivity disruptions and attacks using but not limited to AI/ML techniques, and consequently take the necessary countermeasures. The proposed techniques will be validated using simulations and experiments.