ThingsLocate: A ThingSpeak-Based Indoor Positioning Platform for Academic Research on Location-Aware Internet of Things
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is well oriented and presents the technologies used with precision. However, there are details that should be improved:
In the introduction, it is clear that the platform presented (ThingsLocate) is used only with Wifi technology for indoor positioning. Nothing is commented on a comparison with other technologies in terms of power consumption or availability (for example). In the case of power consumption, it is very important for IoT devices that use batteries as the primary source (in the case showed, devices powered by connection to electrical sources or with long-lasting batteries are used, as mobile devices), especially in the case of enabling Wifi connection permanently.
The use case is an academic / researcher based. It would be good to discuss the advantages/disadvantages of the platform in real case environments (section conclusions)
A review of the platforms is done in section 3 but some more general ones are missing, such as those provided in the cloud by AWS or Google (https://aws.amazon.com/iot/?nc1=h_ls or https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot/) among others. They are generalists and although they do not directly provide data processing/integration solutions, it is relatively easy to integrate execution code (including Matlab). This section should add an additional table that will show the selection criteria used to choose ThingsSpeak (open source, processing, visualization, etc.) to justify the selection of the platform (ThingsSpeak)
In section 4 there are many acronyms (most are in the section of abbreviations) and the normal thing is that the first time they appear they are "explained" (in the sense of indicating what they identify). In particular, Nrc (RC?) appears in many places but is not added as part of the abbreviations.
The similarity metrics are very important and should be explained a little more. They are the base of the comparison and the estimation of the error, so it is essential to know well what they are and how they are calculated
In section 5, the conclusions part should take into account the implementations (cards, chips, etc.) of the Wifi clients used in the measurements because the error estimate is based on the signal strength (RSSI) and probably the sensitivity in those "elements" is different.
The English language should be improved. There are many excessively long sentences and many punctuation marks (specifically there are many ';' which should be '.'). It is necessary to use numbers/symbols in lists (IoT platforms, characteristics, clustering algorithms or similarity metrics, etc.).
A minor detail, it is better do not use the term "closed source" but of "proprietary software" (page 4)
Author Response
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Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors present an interesting paper about indoor localization system supported and ThingsSpeak-based plateform, with some interesting approaches. However you should improve some issues, namely:
- The preparation and definition of the test scenario deserves to be better detailed:
i) what was more precisely the raspberry pi used (2?, 3?, 4?). What are the characteristics of the wi-fi interface?
ii) what device is used to obtain the fingermap?
iii) when the authors present the comparative analysis, will this fact have no influence on the results obtained?
In the comparative analysis, the authors report that the error related to the Y axis in raspberry is significantly larger than that of the X axis. In percentage terms, or absolute? and on other devices (eg Mac PC) does this not happen?
In the text the authors point out that "readability stability" is related to accuracy. Is it more directly related to accuracy or precision?
Ffinally congratulations on your work
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This article is interesting and well motivated. The comments are as follows:
The article proposes a platform for WiFi-based indoor positioning of Internet of Things devices built upon the ThingSpeak IoT cloud platform. Thus, the title of article should reflect cloud technology. And the cloud architecture adopted also should be introduced.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors propose and evaluate an indoor positioning platform, ThingsLocate.
Having motivated their research quite well the reader is introduced to the problem and the overall thoughts behind ThingsLocate. Solutions are technically solid and presentation is overall o high quality. Important references are cited.
A proofread is needed.
Author Response
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