Learning Self-adaptations for IoT Networks: A Genetic Programming Approach

Internet of Things (IoT) is a pivotal technology in application domains that require connectivity and interoperability between large numbers of devices. IoT systems predominantly use a software-defined network (SDN) architecture as their core communication backbone. This architecture offers several advantages, including the flexibility to make IoT networks self-adaptive through software programmability. In general, self-adaptation solutions need to periodically monitor, reason about, and adapt a running system. The adaptation step involves generating an adaptation strategy and applying it to the running system whenever an anomaly arises. In this paper, we argue that, rather than generating individual adaptation strategies, the goal should be to adapt the logic / code of the running system in such a way that the system itself would learn how to steer clear of future anomalies, without triggering self-adaptation too frequently. We instantiate and empirically assess this idea in the context of IoT networks. Specifically, using genetic programming (GP), we propose a self-adaptation solution that continuously learns and updates the control constructs in the data-forwarding logic of SDN-based IoT networks. Our evaluation, performed using open-source synthetic and industrial data, indicates that, compared to a baseline adaptation technique that attempts to generate individual adaptations, our GP-based approach is more effective in resolving network congestion, and further, reduces the frequency of adaptation interventions over time. In addition, we compare our approach against a standard data-forwarding algorithm from the network literature, demonstrating that our approach significantly reduces packet loss.