A Fine-Grained Network Congestion Detection Based on Flow Watermarking

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

.. The following revisions are required.

1. In literature review, add 3 to five more relevant and latest techniques.
2. Add Comparison table at the end of section 2 and compare with at least 10 to 15 techniques with appropriate parameters.
3. Please make sure your paper has necessary language proof-reading.

Author Response

The following revisions are required:

1. In literature review, add 3 to five more relevant and latest techniques.

Response: The relevant and latest techniques have been added in literature review.

2. Add Comparison table at the end of section 2 and compare with at least 10 to 15 techniques with appropriate parameters.

Response: The comparison table, which is the evaluation of several flow watermarking techniques, has been added in section 2.

3. Please make sure your paper has necessary language proof-reading.

Response: Some non-standard expressions have been modified.

Reviewer 2 Report

I cannot grasp why this technique is required in comparison with existing studies. A concrete motivation for the necessity of this paper is essential. For example, the authors might compare the limitations of the previous studies one-by-one for emphasizing the needs of this work. Table 1 might perform such a role, but it appears in Sec. 3, which is the design of this work. 

Why does the SDN approach cost more bandwidth, storage, computing, and other resources? For example, various efforts in reducing overheads in detection (network monitoring) exist as follows.

 - Chowdhury, Shihabur Rahman, et al. "Payless: A low cost network monitoring framework for software defined networks." 2014 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS). IEEE, 2014.

 - G. Yang, et al. "Accurate and Efficient Monitoring for Virtualized SDN in Clouds." IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (2021).

  - Haxhibeqiri, Jetmir, et al. "In-band network monitoring technique to support SDN-based wireless networks." IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management 18.1 (2020): 627-641.

What's the meaning of the Sec. 3.1 title?

The keys and texts in graphs are too small to figure out.

For evaluation, comparisons of this study with related studies are essential.

A moderate check on English grammar and expression is required.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper introduces an interests method for detecting the network congestion. However, despite the fact that the paper has been revised by the authors. I believe it still needs further improvements. Below are some points to consider:

Writing and formatting

1.       Some acronyms are still have no definitions (e.g. IBF).

2.       The paper English writing  is weak. Many weak sentences, words. I recommend asking a professional English editor to revise it. The below are few examples:

-          Please put , before "respectively"  everywhere in the paper.

-          line 308" but the correct result can still be get.-à be obtained

-          Several typos (example: Fig 7 (a) in the caption (idel)?  should it be ideal?

Technical

1.       The authors said: The operation is simple and  fast, but there is an observer effect: What do you mean by  observer effect?

2.       The authors mentioned the below statements:

Passive network congestion detection captures the information of the packets..... It does not generate extra bandwidth overhead, but cannot monitor the global information:

Explain more, "but cannot monitor the global information"? why ?

3.       Eq: 40 what  is no (in words)? The same for Eq. 42 and n3.

Please mention the difference between No and no?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The following revisions are required.

1. In literature review, add 2 to 3 more relevant and latest techniques.

2. Compare with at least 3 to 5 techniques with appropriate parameters. 

3. Please make sure your paper has necessary language proof-reading.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 5 Report

Regarding the article applsci-1828120 entitled A Fine-Grained Network Congestion Detection Based on Flow Watermarking and they have not clearly shown the advantages in performance of their approach with respect to others from the literature in this field.

Authors use a readable English, since there are some parts that was easy to understand. So, Authors expose the justification, and it is easy the exposition of the main problem.

Furthermore, Authors expose the justification and I could find the explanation of the main problem in a clearly way.

Also, this paper is a research based on references of years 1996 to 2022, namely authors do not consider recent references, since the 35% of references of the last five years (from 2017 to 2022),  in addition References are according to the topic that they try to introduce.

Originality Report shows that this article has a similarity index of 8%, which can be considered as original work, this similarity report is attached to this review.

Please consider the following remarks to improve your article (in some cases, P refers to Page or Pages and L is the Line or Lines where you can find these remarks):

·         Section References is not complete, since only  35%  of references can be considered as of recent works.

·         The similarity Index of this work is 8%, so it can be considered as original work .

·         The problem and justification are well described.

·         The comparison between state-of-the-art algorithm is not complete at all.

·         Well distribution of the elements to be described or analyzed

·         There is  not enought experimentation or comparison of the results that demonstrate the novelty of the project.

·         Results improperly exposed

·         Authors use  comparative table of the characteristics of the related work, in addition use some plots that help the experimental results.

·         Equations  are not well described or defined

·         Authors include general algorithm of the proposed work.

·         So many details were omitted in the methodology that it is difficult to estimate the contribution of the article.

So, I suggest modifying, if it is the case, for the publication in the journal Applied Sciences, since the paper by itself have a great potential to publish.

Regards.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors addressed my comments properly. 

Reviewer 5 Report

Regarding the article applsci-1828120 entitled A Fine-Grained Network Congestion Detection Based on Flow Watermarking and they have clearly shown the advantages in performance of their approach with respect to others from the literature in this field.

Authors use a readable English, since there are some parts that was easy to understand. So, Authors expose the justification, and it is easy the exposition of the main problem.

Furthermore, Authors expose the justification and I could find the explanation of the main problem in a clearly way.

Also, this paper is a research based on references of years 2001 to 2022, namely authors consider recent references, since the 59% of references of the last five years (from 2017 to 2022),  in addition References are according to the topic that they try to introduce.

Originality Report shows that this article has a similarity index of 7%, which can be considered as original work, this similarity report is attached to this review.

Please consider the following remarks to improve your article (in some cases, P refers to Page or Pages and L is the Line or Lines where you can find these remarks):

·        Section References is complete, since the most of references  (59%) can be considered as of recent works.

·        The similarity Index of this work is 7%, so it can be considered as original work .

·        The problem and justification are well described.

·        The comparison between state-of-the-art algorithm is complete and enough.

·        Well distribution of the elements to be described or analyzed

·        There is  enought experimentation or comparison of the results that demonstrate the novelty of the project.

·        Results properly exposed

·        Authors use  comparative table of the characteristics of the related work, in addition use some plots that help the experimental results.

·        Equations  are well described or defined

·        Now, this version of the article meets all the requirements to be published. Congratulations to the authors.

So, I suggest modifying, if it is the case, for the publication in the journal Applied Sciences, since the paper by itself have a great potential to publish.

Regards.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf