A Proposal for Decentralized and Secured Data Collection from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Livestock Monitoring with Blockchain and IPFS

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

As the name suggests this article appears to be a proposal or report rather than a scientific paper. 

The paper is loaded with design and development details. It is recommended that it should be rewritten in the style of a scientific paper rather than a project report.  In addition to that please recheck it for typos and grammar mistakes. 

A lot of emphasis has been made on the security features of the the system. However a detailed threat analysis is missing in the paper. Furthermore, the authors need to reevaluate whether certain security requirements need to be considered as non-functional or functional because when security requirements are defined and developed (i.e. code is written to implement them) they become functional. 

Why are authors considering blockchain technology for this project? Blockchain is an expensive technology and only highly valuable transactions are kept on the blockchain because of the gas cost. The authors need to justify the role of blockchain in this project. 

The paper needs to be restructured and requires major revision. 

Author Response

Reviewer#1, Concern # 1: The paper is loaded with design and development details. It is recommended that it should be rewritten in the style of a scientific paper rather than a project report.  In addition to that please recheck it for typos and grammar mistakes.

Author response:  we would like to thank the reviewer for showing us about this issue, as we were going too much into implementation details rather than the required scientific part.

Author action: In addition to adding a new section related to a theoretical model for the project, we have reviewed the whole manuscript to give a more suitable style. Besides, both original and new added content have been double-checked to search for typos and other language-related issues. Changes done in the text style can be seen by means of the text colored in red added to the document.

Reviewer#1, Concern # 2: A lot of emphasis has been made on the security features of the system. However, a detailed threat analysis is missing in the paper. Furthermore, the authors need to reevaluate whether certain security requirements need to be considered as non-functional or functional because when security requirements are defined and developed (i.e., code is written to implement them) they become functional.

Author response:  we are grateful to the reviewer for addressing this problem.

Author action: Additional content has been added to section 3 explaining that the security measures provided for this development are present due to the actual features of the technology used, so that security is already built-in from the building blocks used for the integrated parts. In addition to that, the threat analysis that was included in the previous version of the manuscript (aside from the text, Table 5 showed the main threads that would be faced by the system) has been enhanced. Not only it is explicitly mentioned, but also information about more possible attacks and how to counter them has been included. Figure 6 has been made larger and better explained. With all the performed additions, the security analysis threat has been expanded to almost six pages in the manuscript, covering around one eight of the manuscript total length.

Reviewer#2, Concern # 3: Why are authors considering blockchain technology for this project? Blockchain is an expensive technology and only highly valuable transactions are kept on the blockchain because of the gas cost. The authors need to justify the role of blockchain in this project.

Author response:  we would like to use this chance to thank the reviewer for this observation, we believe it is necessary to describe the usage of blockchain in a way that is as understandable as possible.

Author action: Subsection 3.3.4 has been extended to provide the main reasons on why blockchain was included as part of the proposed system: transparency, distributed storage of multimedia information, modest number of resources needed and support for good practices certification are described. Finally, the particular features of blockchain that support these capabilities (redundancy, immutability, consensus algorithm) have been explicitly cited with the contributions that they make to the proposed system.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

 (1) How are the technology advantages of the proposed scheme compared with the existing methods?

  (2)Why do you use the block-chain and IPFS? The related experiments verification should be provided for supporting you idea, but the comparative results are less.

 (3)The word descriptions are too much. The proposed scheme is not clearly shown. Can you give a scheme figure to illustrate?

(4)The theory analysis and experiments analysis are weak. Those should be strengthened. 

Author Response

Reviewer#2, Concern # 1: How are the technology advantages of the proposed scheme compared with the existing methods?

Author response:  we would like to thank the reviewer for pointing out this issue.

Author action: additional content has been included at the beginning of section three explaining how our system is solving to an extent the open issues that were described in the previous state of the art. A table has been added to summarize and explain in an accurate manner the improvements that are used by using the technologies described in the manuscript.

Reviewer#1, Concern # 2: Why do you use the block-chain and IPFS? The related experiments verification should be provided for supporting you idea, but the comparative results are less.

Author response:  we are grateful to the reviewer for addressing this problem.

Author action: Additional content has been added in section 3.3.4 where there is further justification on why blockchain is used. Among this content, the main reasons on why blockchain was included as part of the proposed system (transparency, distributed storage of multimedia information, modest number of resources needed and support for good practices certification) are cited. In addition to that, the specific features of blockchain that support these capabilities (redundancy, immutability, consensus algorithm) have been further detailed in the manuscript. As for IPFS, further reasoning has been added on section 3.3.3 regarding why we consider how it is useful for this proposal. Finally, the experimental section

Reviewer#2, Concern # 3: The word descriptions are too much. The proposed scheme is not clearly shown. Can you give a scheme figure to illustrate?

Author response:  we would like to use this chance to thank the reviewer for this observation, as we were unaware of this lack of clarity in our manuscript.

Author action: while we had already added Figure 2 as a way to represent all the software components from the system, there was no figure that was containing the hardware parts as well in a visual manner. Therefore, Figure 3 has been added for this purpose, along with several lines and one paragraph expanding the explanation on how the subsystems related with each other.

Reviewer#2, Concern # 4: The theory analysis and experiments analysis are weak. Those should be strengthened.

Author response:  we would like to use this chance to thank the reviewer for making us aware of these issues, as we had not paid enough attention to them.

Author action: significant additions have been done to the content of the manuscript to enhance the analyses. A new section 3.3.1 with a theoretical model for the proposal has been included. In addition to that, the results discussion section has been significantly expanded with a list of all the experiments that were performed with the built prototype, the expected results and any remarkable difference in the outcomes.  

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

（1）What are your innovative work in this paper? Please explain.

 (2) In your contribution description,  hardware and software components are mainly designed in this paper. How do these work reflect your investigation? The main problem is that there are no comparative results to support your investigation work. From your description , you just designed a hardware and software. Please explain.

(3)From your current work, I think the novel work is not enough verified. Although your did a good work, but not a innovative work for publication.  Please explain.

Author Response

Reviewer#1, Concern # 1: What are your innovative work in this paper? Please explain.

Author response:  we would like to thank the reviewer for this observation.

Author action: The innovative work carried out by means of the research and development activities described in the paper have already been described in two different places:

1. Section 1.1 describes the contributions done to the State of the Art. It is implied that, since these are contributions to the State of the Art, they offer novel features that were not present in a combined manner in other of the studied manuscripts. The innovative technologies involved (blockchain, IPFS) are justified extensively in section 3, especially in 3.4.3 (IPFS prototyping) and 3.4.4 (blockchain prototyping).
2. The beginning of Section 3 was extended previously to deal with this issue. Specifically, the first page describes the advantages obtained from the (from our point of view, innovative) work done in the paper, and Table 2 describes how open issues have been tackled to a greater or lesser extent with the new solutions proposed (tailored UAV with FPV system with components oriented towards Smart Farming, IPFS, blockchain for UAV image validation and sharing).

Nevertheless, Section 5 with conclusions has been expanded to describe the innovative work done in an even more explicit manner. We hope that it will show clearly enough the innovations described in the paper.

Reviewer#1, Concern # 2: In your contribution description,  hardware and software components are mainly designed in this paper. How do these work reflect your investigation? The main problem is that there are no comparative results to support your investigation work. From your description , you just designed a hardware and software. Please explain.

Author response:  we would like to thank the reviewer for this observation.

Author action: Although a) comparative results are actually provided in Table 2 (where it is described how our solution tackles the open issues found from the studied literature and what technologies are used to solve them), b) disadvantages for each studied solution are thoroughly described and c) we believe that the purpose of reviewing the existing State of the Art is to identify open issues in the current solutions, since addressing each one of the differences found in the literature is extremely time consuming and pointless depending on the application domain of the found solutions, we have added another table that compares the studied solutions to the one we are putting forward.

We must add that from our point of view, and aside from the study of the State of the Art, it is unfair to claim that “From your description , you just designed a hardware and software”, since we have a) provided a theoretical model to represent the conditions required (Section 3), b) offered a list of functional and non-functional requirements and how they are added to the system, c) added a security threat analysis and the countermeasures used against possible cyberattacks, d) implemented the system, e) tested it (Section 4) and f) indeed, integrated the required hardware components and designed software ones (Section 3).

It is our opinion that the need to have hardware and software components inferred from the requirements provided as a result of the reviewed literature and the questions asked to farm staff reflect the work done in our research.

Reviewer#2, Concern # 3: From your current work, I think the novel work is not enough verified. Although your did a good work, but not a innovative work for publication. Please explain.

Author response:  we would like to thank the reviewer for this point.

Author action: As already explained in the first and last sections of the manuscript (Introduction and Conclusions and Future works), we believe that we have provided an innovative solution due to:

1. Creating guidelines for a tailored UAV for Smart farming purposes from the functional and non-functional requirements formulated, which is an innovation by itself in the reviewed literature, along with other technologies to be used beyond the UAV subsystem in order to offer a development that will fulfill such requirements. It is our opinion that the design and implementation of a system that makes a justified used of a UAV solution combined with blockchain and IPFS in Smart Farming, and provides an advantage compared to the existing solutions (Table 2: Advantages of the proposed system compared to the open issues identified) provides innovative value. These topics are described in section 3.
2. Section 4 provides the testing of the prototype done, yet we believe it is used to verify and prove our previous points. As formulated in the hypothesis (“can a UAVs-based framework be used to monitoring livestock so that data can be collected and can be kept in a secure way?”) our objective with the work done is providing a solution that will collect information relevant to farmers that will cover the gaps detected both by them and in or State of the Art review. The verification of the hypothesis is, from our point of view, actually provided in section 4, when the prototype designed and implemented in section 3 to validate the hypothesis was put to a use. It is shown there that with the tests carried out (which deal with the usual events that farmers would face), the solution can be used for the purposes it was designed for: monitoring livestock to collect data and keep it in the most secure way from the very design of the solution. This is reflected in the paragraph added after Table 8: “It is the opinion of the authors of the paper that the hypothesis that was presented in section 2 (“can a UAVs-based framework be used to monitoring livestock so that data can be collected and can be kept in a secure way?”) has been answered positively, as it has been proven that the UAV can be used to monitor cattle with significant precision, and the data collected from have been gathered and shared in a secure way via a system that made use of a theoretical model that was implemented and tested in real world conditions.”

Section 4 has been further expanded to explicitly mention these aspects right after the previous paragraph.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf