Process-Aware Cross-Layer Adaptation for O-RAN-Enabled Industrial Systems

Abstract

Wireless networks increasingly support closed-loop industrial applications in which sensed data must be transmitted, processed, and converted into an action before physical process makes the result obsolete. Throughput, latency, and inference accuracy measured separately cannot determine whether such an application completed a useful task. We propose a Process-Aware Co-adaptation Engine framework that combines application outcomes, process state, radio telemetry, edge-compute state, and sensing configuration to select coordinated operating points across the complete loop. We evaluate the proposed approach in a factory-inspection case study that integrates a physics-based digital twin, a programmable 5G O-RAN network, and edge-based visual inference. The experiments show that the preferred resource allocation changes with production speed and that adapting individual system components independently can be inefficient. We further show that efficient configurations can be identified with relatively few full-system evaluations.