PhD Studentship opportunity – Radio Access Solution for 5G Enhance Mobile Broadband

The School of Engineering and Digital Arts is pleased to announce a PhD Studentship opportunity in wireless communications entitled: Radio Access Solution for 5G Enhance Mobile Broadband, jointly supervised by Dr Huiling Zhu and Professor Jiangzhou Wang alongside a funded EU Horizon 2020 project: http://5g-drive.eu/.

The successful applicant will be expected to explore suitable radio access technologies in the fifth generation (5G) communication networks and propose novel solutions to optimise spectrum efficiency in order to ensure appropriate high date rate or low latency for enhance mobile broadband (eMBB). It will be expected that performance gains will be demonstrated through practical tests. To achieve this, the applicant will need to be creative and work in close collaboration with other researchers in the project, requiring good communication skills and collaborative problem solving. The work in this PhD project will complement ongoing research collaborations with other project partners.

The successful applicant will be part of the Communications Research Group in the School of Engineering and Digital Arts, the University of Kent. The research group is internationally renowned for research in mobile systems, antennas, and photonics.  It has excellent laboratory facilities including software-based LTE testbed, refurbished anechoic chamber, vector network analyser to 80 GHz, RF measurement up to over 300 GHz, and arbitrary waveform generation and digital sampling oscilloscopes to 50 GHz.  The group has extensive involvement in UK and EU research projects. It possesses a wide range of expertise from theoretical analysis to specific system implementations. The group has strong links with researchers at other British and overseas universities as well as with industrial collaborators.

The main roles of the PhD student will include: 1) understanding the state-of-the-art technologies for providing ultra-high data rate and low latency in 5G communications; 2) proposing novel radio access solutions to optimise the spectral efficiency while ensuring appropriate high date rate or low latency for eMBB; 3) theoretically analysing the proposed solutions and verifying the solution through simulations; 4) potentially testing the solutions in the practical testbed; 5) continually reviewing the literature, and producing results leading to high quality research papers; and 6) giving presentations to research groups and project partners as well as at conferences, writing technical reports and drafting papers for peer reviewed journals.

The candidate will ideally have a Masters degree in Electronics or an Engineering subject related to wireless communications. Research experience in massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) or network slicing is desirable but not essential.

Funding Availability: The successful candidate will be fully funded and the funding will cover both the bursary and fees (for international students) for 3 years.  A travel budget is also available for attending project meetings.

Length of award:  3 years

Start date:  May 2019

Eligibility: Open to all applicants.

Application: Apply for a PhD at

https://www.kent.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/262/electronic-engineering and specify the research topic “5G-DRIVE”.

Enquiries:  Any enquiries relating to the project should be directed to Dr Huiling Zhu: h.zhu@kent.ac.uk

Application Deadline: 1 January 2019