For becoming a PhD student with me you should first be admitted to the EPFL graduate school. You need to apply to the program in Computer, Communication Sciences and Information Sciences (EDIC). You can apply online at http://phd.epfl.ch/application or here.
You may apply to one of the following positions:
We are designing a communication network for monitoring and controlling an electrical distribution network (DN). The DN comprises several phaser measurement units, which produce data every 20 msec, as well as control points. The communication network is used to collect the measurements and send instructions to control points and electrical meters. The DN comprises classical loads, as well as controllable loads, which can receive demand response signals and distributed energy sources (such as solar photovoltaic panels), which may receive generation control signals.
The communication network consists of wireless and wired links, as well as routers and ethernet switches. The goal of the project is to study how to guarantee delays, given that the sources of information have a known minimum interval between data bursts. A theoretical analysis as well as an implementation on a network emulator will be performed.
TCP/IP, Programming, Simulation
The massive use of renewable energy sources poses formidable challenges to match demand and supply. Today's demand in non elastic, which forces providers and distributors to constantly adapt supply to the instantaneous demand. In the future, demand will become flexible, thanks to the presence of buffering (e.g. e-car batteries, warm water tanks for heating systems) or local generation. we want to study scalable, robust and distributed demand control methods, inspired by the traffic control methods successfully deployed in the Internet, and define communication protocols to support demand response.
Probability, Programming, Simulation