[FILLED] Research internship: Experimenting with digital twins for autonomous management of a Sylva telco cloud on SLICES-FR -
Practical information
Start: May 1st, 2025
Duration: 3 to 4 months
Location: IMT Atlantique, Nantes campus (STACK team)
Compensation: legal amount of 4,35 € / hour, full time
Supervision: Baptiste Jonglez (baptiste dot jonglez at inria.fr), Carlos Gonzalez (carlos-javier.gonzalez-santamaria@imt-atlantique.fr), IMT Atlantique & Inria team STACK
Keywords: Virtual Network Functions; Cloud-Native Functions; Digital Twins; SLICES-FR; Sylva; Thing’in
Context
Operator networks have transitioned into the era of virtualization, beginning with the adoption of Virtualized Network Function (VNF) and progressing to Cloud-Native Function (CNF). At the same time, the continued advancement of physical network infrastructure has introduced increased complexity and heterogeneity in both hardware and software systems. This growing complexity poses significant challenges for the automation of network management, affecting both routine operations and incident responses. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive and integrated approach to network systems. We propose to achieve this through three fundamental technological building blocks:
-
Sylva, the native Telco cloud platform, an open-source project developed through Linux Foundation Europe, for automated and declarative deployment of cloud-native network configurations;
-
Thing’in the future, the Digital Twins platform developed by Orange, to achieve advanced autonomous network capabilities: network monitoring, analysis and simulation, orchestration, anomaly detection…
-
SLICES-FR, the French research infrastructure dedicated to large-scale system and network experimentation, which will provide high-performance hardware distributed across the entire cloud/network/edge/IoT continuum.
These technological building blocks are intended to simplify the network management and promote seamless interoperability between heterogeneous systems.
In this project, STACK and Orange are working together as part of a joint Inria team: Orange is developing Thing’in and is contributing to Sylva, while STACK is bringing its expertise on the infrastructure and experimentation side.
Expected Work
The selected candidate will experiment with Sylva, Thing’in and SLICES-FR to evaluate the potential of automated network management. The main objectives of the internship are:
-
deploy and configure Sylva in a reproducible way on SLICES-FR using the EnOSlib tool. EnOSlib provides an experiment-driven, automated, and reproducible framework for managing complex experimental infrastructure.
-
propose an architecture for the joint deployment of Sylva and Thing’in so that Thing’in is able to monitor and configure Sylva dynamically.
-
experiment with this architecture on SLICES-FR.
-
publish the experiment as a blueprint that will be shared with the wider SLICES community, so that other researchers can reproduce the experimental setup developed during the internship.
This internship could possibly be extended as a Phd thesis in the context of the Inria/Orange joint team.
Skills
The following skills are expected from the successful candidate :
- a student in the last year of a Master’s degree in Computer Science (or in the last year of an engineering school with a computer science option);
- a good level of written English;
- basic knowledge of microservices architecture, containers, Kubernetes, and networking;
- experience with software development in Python;
- an ability to collaborate and communicate;
- curiosity and an appetite for learning new things.