IMEC
imec is the world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies. The combination of our widely acclaimed leadership in microchip technology and profound software and ICT expertise is what makes us unique. By leveraging our world-class infrastructure and local and global ecosystem of partners across a multitude of industries, we create groundbreaking innovation in application domains such as healthcare, smart cities and mobility, logistics and manufacturing, and energy.
As a trusted partner for companies, start-ups and universities we bring together close to 3,500 brilliant minds from over 70 nationalities. Imec is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium and also has distributed R&D groups at a number of Flemish universities, in the Netherlands, Taiwan, USA, China, and offices in India and Japan. All of these particular traits make imec to be a top-class employer.
University of Antwerp – imec IDLab Research group
The Internet & Data Lab (IDLab) is an imec research group at the University of Antwerp and Ghent University. IDLab focuses its research on internet technologies and data science. IDLab is a joint research initiative between Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. Bringing together 300 internet experts, we develop technologies outperforming current solutions for communication subsystems, high speed and low power networking, distributed computing and multimedia processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and web semantics. Within Antwerp, where you will work, the overall IDLab research areas are machine learning and wireless networking. IDLab has a unique research infrastructure used in numerous national and international collaborations.
IDLab collaborates with many universities and research centres worldwide and jointly develops advanced technologies with industry (R&D centers from international companies, Flanders’ top innovating large companies and SME’s, as well as numerous ambitious startups).
For further development of the IDLab connected vehicles research stream, we are looking for a PhD candidate in 5G Vehicular Communications.
Context of the PhD vacancy
In support of having self-driving cars, we are now seeking not only to rely on sensors and the
term Connected Autonomous Mobility (CAM) has emerged. Hence, not only cars should be
autonomous, but they should also be connected to each other for ensuring greater safety and
efficiency. The role of wireless communications come into play here allowing vehicles to
communicate not only towards themselves (Vehicle-to-Vehicle, V2V), towards infrastructure
(Vehicle-to-Infrastructure, V2I), but also to the networks (Vehicle-to-Network, V2N). Some
emerging technologies such as IEEE based 802.11p (ITS-G5) and 3GPP based C-V2X (PC5)
have been deployed on the streets in Europe to realize the V2X ecosystem. Although it is
already under development and towards the innovation phase, there are still many aspects to
explore in using V2X for more complex use cases making use of other networking technologies
at different components of the network architecture, such as edge computing, software defined
networking, functionality placement, among others. Our goal is to investigate further how flexible
(software-enhanced) network communications (5G based, soon 6G, from RAN to Core) can
support CAM making use of cutting-edge vehicular and smartcity testbeds and further
enhancing it.
The job
What sets you apart
What we offer