European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship for research on Random-access networks

Dr. Ngo Khac Hoang, a member of the Advanced Institute of Engineering and Technology (AVITECH), VNU University of Engineering and Technology, receives an European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF) for his project “LANTERN: Low-latency and private edge computing in random-access networks” with total funding nearly 200.000 Euros. The project will be conducted in Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. This opens the opportunity to collaborate within AVITECH.

We are living in a world where connected devices outnumber human population, and this trend keeps growing: around 24.6 billion connections are forecasted in 2025—more than three times the estimated population. This gives rise to the Internet of Things (IoT) in which virtually all devices are interconnected and continuously share data. The IoT is a key enabler for a host of applications, such as intelligent transportation systems, smart cities, and smart grids. Thus, it promises to transform the way we live. To realize the IoT, it is crucial and timely to develop a communication and computation infrastructure that is able to support the processing of a vast amount of time-sensitive data, for which a centralized computation is inadequate. Edge computing has emerged as a novel paradigm to guarantee very low-latency and high-bandwidth computing services. It involves moving the computation power from the cloud to where data is generated, by pooling the available resources at the network edge.

This project investigates how low-latency and private edge computing protocols can be developed in wireless random-access networks. Relying on tools from information theory and coding theory, the project will tackle the two following challenging objectives: i) to establish a foundation for privacy and reliability in latency-critical, multi-client and multi-server edge computing in random-access networks; and ii) to devise resilient coding schemes together with energy-efficient and scalable wireless random-access protocols to achieve low latency and preserve privacy in distributed edge computing. The results of this project will help to pave the way to the full realization of the IoT in the near future.

MSCA-IF provides funding for carefully selected projects, to be conducted fully or partly in Europe, proposed by postdoctoral researchers. This program is created by the European Union/European Commission to support research in the European Research Area (ERA). It is among Europe’s most competitive and prestigious research and innovation fellowships. The proposals are evaluated based on their research excellence, their impact on the development of the researchers, and the quality oft he host institution. They are graded following three main criteria, namely, Excellence, Impact, and Implementation. The LANTERN project of Dr. Ngo Khac Hoang received a score of 97.4/100. (The cutoff score for standard-fellowship proposals in information science and engineering is 94/100.)