Infrastructure, facilities and services available to admitted students

The coordinator or the head of the research group will invite students to a meeting at which they can ask any questions they have about the next steps they need to take or rules governing the doctoral programme. The coordinator will also clarify and underscore key points that students should be aware of, including academic progress requirements, monitoring of their progress, and what is expected of them.

All students conducting research within the framework of the doctoral programme in Network Engineering are assigned a comfortable, suitable workspace in an office or laboratory shared with other students. This arrangement is intended to foster a spirit of community that encourages the free exchange of ideas and collaborative work. Each student’s individual workspace is equipped with a desktop PC with an office suite of basic software, calculation or simulation tools available through the UPC’s software repository, and tools for cooperation and for accessing bibliographic databases. Students have access to office supplies, a printing service, meeting rooms equipped with projection and videoconferencing equipment, and common areas for informal meetings (with a fridge, microwave and coffee maker).

The Department’s management unit supports students in various ways, from handling funding for trips (to participate in conferences or attend meetings related to international projects) to providing assistance with the defence process in the final stage of thesis preparation.

In addition to the facilities and services already mentioned, the Department’s various research areas have specific resources, which are briefly described below.

Students working on a doctoral thesis with the Design and Evaluation of Broadband Networks and Services (BAMPLA) research group have access to various facilities for the emulation and simulation of networks and services, and to adapted spaces for conducting research with top-of-the-line network equipment. These spaces include the Networks and Services Laboratory, which has EPON/GPON equipment, Metro Ethernet, gateways and computing and storage environments that allow for the concatenation of NFV/SDN-based services configured according to user needs—all connected to an experimental network with continental output at 10 Gbps.

Doctoral candidates working with the Information Security Group (ISG-MAK) research area have access to the services of a network drive space to create backups and several calculation servers optimised for the execution of various simulators. The ISG group also has a virtualisation environment made up of five high-performance servers that can be used to carry out studies on complex network infrastructure.

 Doctoral candidates working with the Smart Services for Information Systems and Communication Networks group (SISCOM) have access to computers optimised for tasks involving intensive calculation and simulation processes. They will have an individual personal computer available in the laboratory to work on their research. The group has a global simulation platform composed of several simulators (NS-3, OMNeT++, SUMO, Veins, OpenStreetMaps) where the PhD candidates can implement and evaluate their approaches. They also have available several network infrastructure, adhoc and mesh devices, sensors to develop real testbeds to implement their proposals.

In addition to making various high-performance calculation servers available to doctoral students, the Wireless Networks Group (WNG) provides them with access to equipment for studying radio resource management, including spectrum analysers, oscilloscopes and high-precision power supplies for studying the energy consumption of small devices.

 The Group also has state-of-the-art equipment for research on wireless local area networks (WLANs), personal area networks, sensor networks and visible light communication (VLC) and 5G infrastructure, including software licences and the hardware needed to provide development environments for different platforms of such networks.

 With respect to its sensor networks, the Group has extensive fixed infrastructure, composed of dozens of nodes that can be managed remotely to configure a large number of experiments. Teaching laboratories—equipped with network analysers, switches and routers, and Wi-Fi access points—can be used by doctoral students when they are not being used for master’s degree classes.