Software Engineer: Dublin, Ireland.





The Organization: activities and website

The Performance  Engineering  Lab  (PEL)  is  an  applied  research  lab  in
University College Dublin: the  lab  focuses  on  research  with  commercial
potential and performs  a  mix  of  state  funded  and  industrially  funded
research. The group's primary objective is to bring the research  work  from
the  research  laboratory  to  the  marketplace.  The  group  has  excellent
linkages with both national and international industry.

The group is very active in mobile and  multimedia  communications  systems.
Examples of the types of activities the group engages in are the following:

    . Performance of WiFi based mesh networks;

    . Performance of multihop WiMAX networks;

    . Delivery of VoIP services over WLAN;

    .  Terminal  controlled  handover  between  heterogeneous  radio  access
      networks (WiFi, WiMAX, cellular).

The  group  comprises  of  academic  staff,  postgraduate  researchers   and
software engineers.

Website: http://pel.ucd.ie



Project: Real Time Video Distribution using a P2P architecture

The group will commence working on  a  two-year  project  which  focuses  on
developing a commercial solution for real-time video content delivery  using
a P2P architecture to be deployed in a  Network  Operator  environment.  The
project will commence in Sept 2007.

The project has a number of innovative components including:

    . development  of  a  multi-source  streaming  solution:  this  involves
      developing a solution to the issue of real-time  content  delivery  by
      simultaneously streaming content from a number of peers  to  a  single
      destination peer. It will be necessary to provide appropriate encoding
      for  content,  appropriate  extensions  to  signalling  protocols  and
      appropriate techniques to recombine the content  from  the  individual
      streams to realise the best user experience;

    . development of a search and index capability: this involves developing
      a distributed intelligence which retains knowledge of what content  is
      in the network - similar to a tracker in other P2P systems. This  will
      involve  developing  signalling  mechanisms  to   ensure   that   this
      distributed database is kept current, to provide  search  capabilities
      (probably integrated  with  IMDB)  for  the  content  and  finally  to
      determine which peers should be used to stream content to a requesting
      peer.

Security is also a very major concern in the project, and  some  aspects  of
this will be dealt with in this work; however, much of  this  work  will  be
undertaken by our partner in this initiative.




The Role

The  group  is  seeking  two  suitably-qualified   software   engineers   to
participate in the above project. The role will entail:

    . developing detailed system specification at project commencement;

    . working with the management team to develop appropriate ways to divide
      the tasks;

    . developing system based on above specification;

    . working as part of a team comprising of the project managers and other
      developers;

    . interacting with our  parent  on  this  project  to  ensure  that  the
      capabilities developed within the lab can be integrated with those  of
      our partner;

    . writing project deliverables;

    . engagement with industrial partners as appropriate.

Note that the working language of the group is English.

Competencies required

The  candidate  is  expected  to  have  significant  experience  with  C/C++
development in  Linux,  and  be  generally  comfortable  with  Linux  system
development  with  an  emphasis  on  network  programming.  A  deep   TCP/IP
networking knowledge is therefore required, with  an  emphasis  on  Internet
streaming protocols suit (RTP/RTCP, RTSP, and SDP). Aspects  of  the  system
will be developed  in  Java  or  C#  and  experience  with  these  would  be
advantageous.

Any experience working with multimedia streaming libraries such  as  LIVE555
or FFMPEG would be highly beneficial.

The position is primarily meant for students that graduated from the  Master
Ingnierie des Rseaux (IR). However, candidates from other  specializations
will also be considered depending on their software development experience.

Conditions

The candidate will be remunerated based on  his  experience,  starting  from
36000 per annum (approx 2250 per month after tax - "net d'impts").  A  12
month contract will be  offered  initially,  but  will  be  extended  to  24
months, depending  on  the  performance  of  the  candidate.  Generous  non-
contributory pension provisions will also be made.

UCD  Computer  Science  and  Informatics  department  was  deemed  the  best
Computer Science department in  Ireland  in  a  recent  survey  by  a  state
organization.



Contact (name, position, email and phone)

|Dr. Sean Murphy                                 |Dr. Hamid Nafaa             |
|Research Fellow, UCD CSI department             |Research Fellow, UCD CSI    |
|Email: sean.murphy@iname.com                    |department                  |
|Phone: +353 8685 78462                          |Email: nafaa@ieee.org       |
|                                                |Phone: +353 8778 22274      |