Smart Recommendation of Mobile Broadband Accesses using Crowdsensing


Supervision

Host

ADAM Research Group
Inria Lille - Nord Europe
Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne
40, avenue Halley - Bat. B, Park Plaza
59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq - FRANCE

Context

Inria, the national institute for research in computer science and control, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST). Throughout its eight research centres located in seven major regions (Aquitaine, Bretagne, Lorraine, Île-de-France, Nord Pas-de-Calais, Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur, Rhône-Alpes), the Institute has a workforce of 3,700, 2,900 of whom are scientists from Inria and its partner organizations. Inria has an annual budget of 162 million euros, 20% of which comes from its own research contracts and development products. Inria develops many partnerships with industry and fosters technology transfer and company foundations in the field of ICST - some eighty companies have been funded. Startups are financed in particular by Inria Transfer, a subsidiary of Inria that supports four startup funds. The international collaborations are based on an incentive strategy of welcoming and recruiting foreign students as well as developing strong exchanges between research scientists. Priority is given to geographic zones with strong growth: Europe, Asia and North America while maintaining reasonable cooperation with South America, Africa and Middle-East.

ADAM is a project-team of the Inria Lille - Nord Europe research center. Members of the ADAM project-team are also part of the LIFL (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille) which is a joint unit between CNRS and the University of Lille 1. The objective of the ADAM (Adaptive Distributed Applications and Middleware) project-team is to provide a set of concepts, paradigms, approaches, frameworks, and tools based on advanced software engineering techniques such as CBSE (Component-Based Software Engineering), AOSD (Aspect-Oriented Software Development) or CAC (Context-Aware Computing) to build distributed adaptive software systems (applications and middleware) involving in multi-scale environments and to take into account the adaptation all along the software life-cycle. The ADAM project-team proposes solutions to manage the evolution of application requirements in terms of functional and extra-functional properties either at the level of execution platforms or at the design level. The ADAM project-team applies them to component-based and service-oriented computing distributed applications and platforms.


Project

The mobile network is becoming increasingly complex: more and more devices are continuously connected, from tablets to smartphones [1–5]. This ecosystem of disparate elements from many vendors stresses the mobile networks. Maintaining a stable connectivity for a device while moving requires technical skills well beyond the average. We will therefore be interested in the deployment of new Internet services measurements in the context of mobile broadband access. While mobile devices (smartphones, tablet PC) can be used to access Internet in a residential context, this thesis considers the quality of their Internet connectivity in a mobility scenario according to the specificity of the usages in this context (e.g., GPS). The expected outcomes of this thesis will be i) an energy-wise integration of measurement algorithms in a variety of mobile devices, ii) a spatiotemporal tomography of Internet Quality of Experience (QoE) for mobile users, iii) an Internet service provider recommendation engine based on user profiles.

The selected candidate is expected to contribute to the APISENSE platform, which is currently developed within the team [6,7]. APISENSE is a distributed platform dedicated to crowd-sensing activities. APISENSE exploits the sensors of mobile devices that are shared by participants to observe physical or behavioral phenomemons. The challenges related to the development of such a platform encompasses user privacy and security, battery preservation, and user accessibility.


Suitable Background

Applicants must have a degree in Computer Science, or in a related study, with excellent results. They must also be able to demonstrate interest in scientific research. You may apply if you have not yet completed your degree, but expect to do so before the position starts.

Inria and the University Lille 1 are equal opportunity employers. Knowledge of French is not a prerequisite for application. English is our working language for research. The current PhD students and postdocs in our group are coming from more than 6 different countries. We expect the candidate to be internationally oriented and willing to do, for example, summer internships abroad.


Salary

1,950.00 € gross per month (social protection and health care included)

Contact & Application

For more information, please contact Romain Rouvoy (ADAM @ Inria Lille – Nord Europe). Please provide a CV, list of publications, a research statement (1 to 4 pages), and at least two references (whom we will contact ourselves for a recommendation).


References

  1. MobiPerf: Mobile Network Measurement System. J. Huang, C. Chen, Y. Pei, Z. Wang, Z. Qian, F. Qian, B. Tiwana, Q. Xu, Z. Morley Mao, M. Zhang, P. Bahl, Technical Report. 2012.
  2. Broadband Access to the Internet via Mobile Interfaces. P. Bardowski, J. Klink, M. J. Podolska, T. Uhl. IEEE WMCNT 2012.
  3. A Close Examination of Performance and Power Characteristics of 4G LTE Networks. J. Huang et al. MobiSys 2012.
  4. Measurement Lab: Overview and an Invitation to the Research Community. C. Dovrolis, K. Gummadi, A. Kuzmanovic, S. D. Meinrath. SIGCOMM CCR 2010.
  5. A Mobile Network Neutrality Monitoring System. WindRider.
  6. A preliminary investigation of user incentives to leverage crowdsensing activities. N. Haderer, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. In PerHot’13. March 2013.
  7. AntDroid: A distributed platform for mobile sensing. N. Haderer, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. Inria research report RR-7885. 2012.