2023-05764 - PhD Position F/M Towards an efficient economic orchestration of 5G and beyond networks

Contract type : Fixed-term contract

Level of qualifications required : Graduate degree or equivalent

Fonction : PhD Position

About the research centre or Inria department

The Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique Centre is one of Inria's eight centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Center is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.

Context

5G (and even more Beyond-5G and 6G networks) is expected to increase throughput by a factor up to 100 with respect to 4G, and to allow to connect enormous numbers of devices, from phones to cars and any type of object all over the world. What’s more, 5G enables the support of a broad range of services, even the most demanding ones, including real-time interactivity, such as autonomous driving.

The evolution to a network with multiple players offering connectivity and resources across access, edge and core networks from multiple business partners introduces challenging issues about the relations between those actors and the implications on the overall operations of the network. This study is driven by technological propositions, that impact business models and interactions. A typical example is network slicing, aimed at supporting services with heterogeneous constraints, that is also an opportunity for Network Operators (NOs) to get more value out of the transport of services by being part of the content distribution value chain. Network slicing is also seen as one of the most important building blocks for network automation, as it brings more agility in the management of services. Here, an economic model needs to be associated with the technological innovation and its behavior studied in an orchestrated network.

The PhD will be realized within the Ermine Inria team, which has network economics as one of its main research activities, and will be funded by the PEPR 5G project.

 

Assignment

The goal of the thesis is to identify, to formally define the economic relations between partners, and to embed these aspects in the service offering and provisioning and their associated operation and management. The purpose is to investigate the potential need to regulate the relations towards an efficient orchestration, and compliance to existing legislation, particularly the one around network neutrality: is a technological proposition an infringement to the current legislation, and can it be adapted?

 

Main activities

The PhD consists in several actions:

  • Designing a mathematical model of the interactions in such orchestrated networks, including the technological features;

  • Using tools from game theory to determine the best strategies for each actor;

  • More precisely, leveraging mechanism design theory to determine rules (e.g., regulation) which could be imposed for an optimal network operation. Economic regulation (based on rule limitations and/or taxes) and technical regulation (on limiting the technologies/algorithms) can be applied and will be studied toward this goal, and compared in order to determine the best strategy.

    The output will contribute to:

    Allow for the analysis of the effectiveness of potential strategies before their deployment.

    Investigate appropriate regulation procedures (if needed) towards an efficient orchestration.

 

Skills

Technical skills and level required : Master

Languages : English.

 

Benefits package

  • Subsidized meals
  • Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
  • Possibility of teleworking (90 days per year) and flexible organization of working hours
  • Partial payment of insurance costs

Remuneration

monthly gross salary amounting to :

  • 2051 euros for the first and second years and
  • 2158 euros for the third year