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Unfortunately, the community still lacks a tool to facilitate parameter exploration while minimizing the necessary experimentation time on testbeds. Such a tool would be invaluable, as exhaustive parameter searches can be time-prohibitive or unfeasible given limited testbed availability, whereas non-exhaustive unguided searches rarely deliver satisfactory results. In this article, we present APEX, a framework enabling an automated and informed parameter exploration for low-power wireless protocols and allowing convergence to the best parameter set within a limited number of testbed trials. We design APEX using Gaussian processes to effectively handle noisy experimental data and estimate the optimality of a parameter combination. After developing a prototype of APEX, we demonstrate its effectiveness by parametrizing two IEEE 802.15.4 protocols across a wide range of application requirements. Our results show that APEX can return the best parameter set with up to 10.6\u00d7, 4.5\u00d7, 4.3\u00d7, and 3.25\u00d7 less testbed trials than traditional solutions based on exhaustive search, greedy approaches, support vector regression and reinforcement learning, respectively.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3770918","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,4]],"date-time":"2025-10-04T10:50:15Z","timestamp":1759575015000},"page":"1-36","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["APEX: Automated Parameter Exploration for Low-Power Wireless Protocols"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"21","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1685-9122","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mohamed Hassaan","family":"Mohamed Hydher","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Graz University of Technology","place":["Graz, Austria"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8651-3725","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Markus","family":"Schuss","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Graz University of Technology","place":["Graz, Austria"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7849-3368","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Olga","family":"Saukh","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Graz University of Technology","place":["Graz, Austria"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4248-4424","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kay","family":"R\u00f6mer","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Graz University of Technology","place":["Graz, Austria"]}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7647-3734","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Carlo Alberto","family":"Boano","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Graz University of Technology","place":["Graz, Austria"]}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,17]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_3_2_2","first-page":"459","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2nd World Forum on the Internet of Things.","author":"Adjih C.","year":"2015","unstructured":"C. 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