[DMANET] Postdoctoral position at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France

Sorry for the multiple copies
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The SARA team (http://www.laas.fr/SARA-EN/) at LAAS-CNRS
(http://www.laas.fr/), Toulouse, France, is seeking a 1-year postdoc
(possible extension to 18 months) to work on the FP7 project PANACEA.
The project is to be started in October 2013. The main objective of
PANACEA is to provide Proactive Autonomic Management of Cloud Resources.
The position is to be filled by April 2014 at latest. The selected
candidate will join a research group composed of Olivier Brun
(http://homepages.laas.fr/brun/), Urtzi Ayesta
(http://homepages.laas.fr/urtzi/) and Balakrishna Prabhu
(http://homepages.laas.fr/bala/). The monthly gross salary is around €
2,500. The selected candidate will be encouraged to apply to CNRS and
Université de Toulouse in order to obtain a permanent appointment at LAAS.

Title: Design of autonomic communication overlays
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Context:
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It is now broadly admitted that the performances of individual Internet
flows could be improved by selecting alternate paths to the one proposed
by IP routing protocols. As well, a number of recent studies have shown
that the IP routing protocols are slow to react and recover from link
failure or congestion. Unfortunately, the routing infrastructure of the
Internet has become resistant to major changes. The use of overlay
networks has been proposed as an alternative solution that can
potentially provide the desirable flexibility and control over the
routing infrastructure. An overlay network instantiates a virtual
network on top of a physical network by deploying a set of overlay nodes
above the existing Internet routing substrate. Overlay nodes cooperate
with each other to route packets on behalf of any pair of communicating
nodes, forming an overlay network.

By monitoring the functioning and quality of the Internet paths and
using advanced machine-learning algorithms, the PANACEA architecture
will enable: (a) to predict traffic anomalies (e.g., traffic congestion,
link/node failures), and (b) to dynamically reconfigure the
communication paths so as to optimize application-specific routing
metrics before these anomalies happen. Our goals are thus to design an
architecture solution based on dynamic overlays that can enable the
users: (a) to specify the required application properties, (b) to design
the most adequate overlay for his application, and (c) to control how
the overlay is reconfigured in reaction to predicted adverse events.


Candidate Profile:
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The candidate must have:
- a PhD degree in computer science or control theory,
- excellent skills in stochastic modelling (queueing theory, MDPs,...),
optimization or game theory,
- knowledge in the domain of communication networks,
- good organizational and communication skills.

Application:
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Each application must contain the following documents:
- a detailed CV
- a cover letter with a short description of previous works
- one or two references with contact addresses

Applications should be sent electronically to Olivier Brun (brun@laas.fr).

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