Survey of Network Coding Based P2P File Sharing in Large Scale Networks

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript is a survey of network coding in P2P networks.
A strength of the paper is the summary of about 100 papers and the primary classification of these.
The discussion section (nearly 1 page) and summary across these could be stronger as this is a contribution of the paper. It mentions the robustness of churn decoding and network overhead, and it elaborates on some commonalities of the different strategies.

I generally believe there is potential in the paper to provide a good overview for authors working in the field.
However, from a summary paper, I expect as a contribution a bit more discussion and a refined classification.
I believe in a minor revision the minor issues can be resolved and maybe one page needs to be added to the paper to discuss/summarize the papers better.

Minor:
How do you re-evaluate the decoding rate of Paircoding (Figure 6, Line 352ff)?

Detailed comments:
1. Peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution or file sharing system aims to
Peer-to-peer content distribution systems and file sharing systems aim to

"Network coding is a new transmission technique" => I wouldn't argue that network coding is new, as the general idea dates before the 2000's, particularly linear network coding(Celebiler, M.; G. Stette (1978). "On Increasing the Down-Link Capacity of a Regenerative Satellite Repeater in Point-to-Point Communications". Proceedings of the IEEE. 66 (1): 98–100.).
It did become popular lately though and the specific subfield in P2P you refer to it is recently applied. => Clarify the sentence / maybe weaken the meaning.

12. [The] Peer...
14. The logic between the two sentences is not clear... or a client; here, data stored
17. "On the other hand" => This is a semantical wrong usage of this phrase. Check the remaining occurrences in the paper as it happens several times.

102. Furthermore, R 1 will receive message <a> two times => This is not clear, I suppose it is received once by each receiver...

Equation 3. Is there a typo? "." instead of "\cdot"? Same for Equation 4.

130. I would put () around x^4+x and x^3...
156. "Second, ... second" => Remove first "Second," or replace with "Next,"
251. "nxn" => "n x n"
300. "[The] Chord overlay"
There is an issue with the bracket in Equation 9 and 10 "P(i,j)".

334. performane
In Table 3: "Encoding/decoding" is outside the page.

Table 4: fix the sentence:
"BRONCO far outperforms HTTP meanwhile performs almost as good as BitTorrent."

I find the quality of Figure 7 (seems like a JPEG) not sufficient to meet the quality goals of the journal => recreate the figure. Figure 9 might benefit from a slightly higher resolution.

Figure 8. caption: "[.]a)"
604. ",d,"

665. [a] tradeoff ... [and a] tradeoff
678. [a] tradeoff
679. [a] hot research topic

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review for Applied Sciences Manuscript applsci-736470
Title: Survey of Network Coding Based P2P File Sharing in Large Scale Networks
Authors: Anas AbuDaqa, Ashraf Mahmoud, Marwan Abu-Amara, Tarek Sheltami

In this paper, the authors present a very detailed and careful survey of the latest network coding techniques being used in P2P file sharing over large networks. Firstly, I believe that the paper is well written. The problem statement and the motivation is presented well. The structure and layout the typesetting is particularly appealing. The background, terminology and necessary information required to comprehend the paper is carefully laid out prior to discussing the concepts. This makes the paper relatively self-contained and affords a smooth read. Specifically, the math typesetting using LaTeX is well done, including the punctuation and grammatical aspects of typesetting math formulas inline with text, which is particularly challenging if one is not careful. Around this time, I was beginning to wonder how the authors differentiated this survey article from those that exist in the body of work. The related works section does clarify this and points out that while the extant survey articles in the literature do indeed survey most of the techniques discussed herein, they have included some late-breaking algorithms into the discussion. Furthermore, the authors have gone beyond the scope of a typical survey paper and have deemed it useful to include classification and analysis of these applications. My only complaint with this submission stems after observing the bibliography/references. Predominantly most articles that are cited are dated. There are only a handful of articles from the past few years (2017+). I am left to wonder why this is the case. Either this topic has not garnered much interest from the community or it questions the veracity of the earlier claims of having included the latest techniques, not covered by earlier survey papers. In either context, I would love to see the authors address this concern and discuss it further. In summary, this is a reasonably valuable contribution, with much thought and effort spent on drafting the paper, which is well-written, and laid out making it an enjoyable read. To the question of whether there is a novel contribution here, depends on how the question I have posed in this review gets addressed.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx