The Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF) programme is a highly prestigious renowned EU-funded scheme. It offers talented scientists a unique chance to set up 2-year research and training projects with the support of a supervising team. Besides providing an attractive grant, it represents a major opportunity to boost the career of promising researchers. 

Research laboratories in Brittany are thus looking for excellent postdoctoral researchers with an international profile to write a persuasive proposal to apply for a Marie S. Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2025 (deadline of the EU call is set for 10th September 2025). The topic and research team presented below have been identified in this regard.

Main Research Field 

Information Science and Engineering (ENG)

Research sub-field(s)

Networking, Modeling, Statistical tests

Keywords

Network Neutrality, Search Neutrality, CDNs, Monitoring, statistical tests

Research project description

According to network neutrality principles all data packets are supposed to be treated the same at each node of the network, without any distinction of their type, terminal, origin or destination. Our goal is to develop measurement tools allowing to detect if a non-neutral behavior can be highlighted, this for the various actors of the Internet network: network access providers first, the main target of the network neutrality debate, but not only. Indeed, a packet-focused neutrality can be circumvented by applying a service differentiation at another level: it could for example be the case by choosing the data cached at the edge of the network to provide a better quality of service, or even at the search engine level. An implicit goal will then be to define a neutral (or fair) behavior for each actor, to define the associated metrics, and to set up corresponding measurement techniques.

The Postdoctoral fellow will work on designing tests of neutrality infringements, with a particular interest for video streaming. The goal is to develop rigorous methodologies to analyze if a traffic is manipulated by an ISP. Strong mathematical grounds with clear and transparent methods are required if we want the methods to be later used to enforce compliance with the rules: up to now, the existing methods have been based on heuristics. While existing tests comparing a differentiated and non-differentiated traffic are based on heuristics, they could be invalidated if used for example by experts in court. One of the difficulties for not applying standard and known statistical tests properly is because of the non-independence of data. For example, thanks to so-called batching techniques used in simulation for output analysis of stochastics processes.

References:

• P. Maillé and B. Tuffin, From Net Neutrality to ICT neutrality. Springer, 2022.
• A. Molavi Kakhki, A. Razaghpanah, A. Li, H. Koo, R. Golani, D. Choffnes, P. Gill, and A. Mislove, “Identifying Traffic Differentiation in Mobile Networks,” Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 239–251, October 2015.
• T. Garrett, L. E. Setenareski, L. M. Peres, L. C. E. Bona, and E. P. Duarte, “Monitoring network neutrality: A survey on traffic differentiation detection,” IEEE Communications Surveys Tutorials, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 2486–2517, 2018.

Supervisor

The Postdoctoral Fellow will be supervised by Bruno Tuffin at the ERMINE team of the Inria Centre. He is Senior Researcher at Inria and head of the ERMINE team. His research interests include telecommunication-related economic models. He also holds a strong expertise in statistics, his second research activity (his PhD thesis was on Monte Carlo simulation) which will be helpful to design rigorous statistical tests of neutrality infringements. Overall, he has published close to two hundred papers among which the amount listed above on network neutrality issues. He has also led or participated into several French and European projects on network economics (including leading an ANR project called CAPTURES on the analysis of competition between providers), and co-organized several conferences. He is currently or was Area and Associate Editor for four different journals. He has written or co-written several books among which the following two related to the project: Telecommunication Network Economics: From Theory to Applications published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and From Net Neutrality to ICT Neutrality, Springer, 2022.

Web page : https://people.rennes.inria.fr/Bruno.Tuffin/Tuffin_en.htm

Google scholar : https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=o8PUSSIAAAAJ&hl=fr

Department/Research                       

Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology. World-class research, technological innovation and entrepreneurial risk are its DNA. In 215 project teams, most of which are shared with major research universities, more than 3,900 researchers and engineers explore new paths, often in an interdisciplinary manner and in collaboration with industrial partners to meet ambitious challenges. As a technological institute, Inria supports the diversity of innovation pathways: from open source software publishing to the creation of technological startups (Deeptech).

The Inria Centre at Rennes University was established in 1980. The Centre has 30 research teams, 24 being shared with the IRISA mixed research unit. Its activities occupy over 600 people, scientists and research innovation support staff, including 50 different nationalities. The Inria Centre at Rennes University covers a wide range of expertise in Computer Science, with scientific priorities such as secure digital society, human-robot-virtual world interactions, digital biology and health and digital ecology.

Location : Centre Inria de l’Université de Rennes, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042, Rennes, France 

Suggestion for interdisciplinary / intersectoral secondments and placements : No secondment scheduled.

Skills Requirements

• Specific Skill Requirements: Basic notions on networking, streaming, ability to code (in Python), and notions in statistics.
• Required Language: knowledge on Python is required

Eligibility criteria for applicants

Academic qualification: By the MSCA-PF call deadline (10 September 2025), applicants must be in possession of a doctoral degree, defined as a successfully defended doctoral thesis, even if the doctoral degree has yet to be awarded.

Research experience: Applicants must have a maximum of 8 years full-time equivalent experience in research, measured from the date applicants were in possession of a doctoral degree. Years of experience outside research and career breaks (e.g. due to parental leave), will not be taken into account.

Nationality & Mobility rules: Applicants can be of any nationality but must not have resided more than 12 months in France in the 36 months immediately prior to the MSCA-PF call deadline (10 September 2025).

Application process

We encourage all motivated and eligible postdoctoral researchers to send their expressions of interest through the EU Survey application form (link here)[1], before 31st May 2025. Your application shall include:

• a CV detailing: (i) for each position you had, the exact dates and location (country) and (ii) a list of accepted publications;
• a cover letter including a research outline (up to 2 pages) identifying the research synergies with the project supervisor(s) and proposed research topics described above.

Estimated timetable

Deadline for sending an expression of interest : 31st May 2025

Selection of the applicant : June 2025 at the latest

Writing the MSCA-PF proposal with the support of the above-mentioned supervisor(s) : June – September 2025

MSCA-PF 2025 call deadline : 10 September 2025

Publication of the MSCA-PF evaluation results : February 2026

Start of the MSCA-PF project (if funded) : May 2026 (at the earliest) 
 

[1]https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/a142feb3-20b3-8a4e-f4f4-c4ba71794d2b