M2 Internship "Toward Failure-Resilient Service Function Chaining: Novel Formulation and Heuristic Approach"

This six-month Master’s internship (ideally from mid-January to mid-July 2026) will take place at the LIA (Computer Science) Lab of Avignon University, located in the picturesque city of Avignon, in the south of France.

The Master’s intern will be supervised by two researchers at LIA: one specializing in resilient network optimization, while the other specializing in operation research. 

This interdisciplinary collaboration will provide a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of network resilience and operation research. The selected intern will receive a standard stipend of approximately 600 euros per month, in accordance with French internship regulations.
 

A 6-month internship opportunity is available at the LIA (Computer Science Lab) of Avignon University, located in the south of France. This internship focuses on a cutting-edge topic in networking: Toward Failure-Resilient Service
Function Chaining: Novel Formulation and Heuristic Approach.

Context : 

The ICT infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex and interdependent due to rapid trends such as virtualization, softwarization, data massification, and cloudification. With the widespread deployment of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), fault-tolerant and automated network operations are becoming critically necessary, warranting substantial research efforts.

To guarantee the resilience of SFCs in the Beyond 5G core networks against large-scale disaster failures, the most common approach is to deploy redundant instances of each VNF across multiple DCs and to compute both a primary (working) path and a dedicated backup path for each SFC.  Nevertheless, the problem of failure-resilient SFC provisioning involves several interrelated network optimization dimensions, including VNF placement optimization, SFC working and backup path computation, and resource allocation for intra- and inter-SFC capacity sharing strategies. Each of these subproblems is known to be NP-hard, making the joint optimization highly challenging. With the increasing importance of optimization in emerging networks—such as data center networks and
beyond 5G infrastructures—it is both pressing and necessary to study the effectiveness and performance of such techniques to enhance overall network resiliency.

 Internship Objectives
To address the above challenges, this internship will focus on designing intelligent Integer Linear Programming (ILP) or Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulations, as well as developing efficient
(meta-)heuristics to optimize network resource allocation for resilient SFC provisioning.

•  Objective 1: Intra-SFC Sparse Capacity Sharing

(1) Develop a novel ILP/MIP formulation for resilient SFC provisioning proposed in [8], that leverages
concurrent instantiation of VNFs, multi-path routing, as well as load heterogeneity across different
paths.
(2) Design a constrained shortest-path heuristic for the joint VNF placement and SFC routing problem,
based on multipartite graph modeling in [10]. 

•  Objective 2: Inter-SFC Spare Capacity Sharing

ˆ Develop ILP/MIP formulations to enable efficient resource sharing across multiple

We invite applications from Master’s students or final-year engineering students with a strong background in one or more of the following areas: Operations Research and Graph Theory, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, as well as Network Optimization.

(1) 2nd year Master student or last year Engeneer student 

(2) Operation research, Combinatorial Optimization, AI,  Networking

(3) Networking

(4) Sufficient English Language Level

(5) Starting date is flexiable ( ideally from mid-January to mid-July 2026, but strating not late than the end of February 2026)