MERA: Meta-Learning Based Runtime Adaptation for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

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IEEE 802.15.4-based industrial wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) have been widely deployed to connect sensors, actuators, and controllers in industrial facilities. Configuring an industrial WSAN to meet the application-specified quality of service (QoS) requirements is a complex process, which involves theoretical computation, simulation, and field testing, among other tasks. Since industrial wireless networks become increasingly hierarchical, heterogeneous, and complex, many research efforts have been made to apply wireless simulations and advanced machine learning techniques for network configuration. Unfortunately, our study shows that the network configuration model generated by the state-of-the-art method decays quickly over time. To address this issue, we develop a ME ta-learning based R untime A daptation (MERA) method that efficiently adapts network configuration models for industrial WSANs at runtime. Under MERA, the parameters of the network configuration model are explicitly trained such that a small number of optimization steps with only a few new measurements will produce good generalization performance after the network condition changes. We also develop a data sampling method to reduce the measurements required by MERA at runtime without sacrificing its performance. Experimental results show that MERA achieves higher prediction accuracy with less physical measurements, less computation time, and longer adaptation intervals compared to a state-of-the-art baseline.