A Survey on LoRaWAN Technology: Recent Trends, Opportunities, Simulation Tools and Future Directions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present a comparative review of five Low-Power Wide Area Network technologies used in IoT and IIoT. The paper presents many acronyms, including some that are not defined in the abstract. The authors should avoid the use of such abbreviations prior to their definitions. The paper is well written and is scientifically sound, bringing contributions to the field of low-power protocols for the Internet of Things. There are some adjustments that need to be carried out by the authors before the paper can be published. These include adjusting the font on some figures to make them fit the page and also make them easily readable. I would like the authors to comment about the implementation (at least the plans to implement) LPWAN using the brand new 5G technology in cellular networks.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 

Thanks so much for your valuable comments. It's have been taken into consideration.

Please see the attachment.

Thanks again.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

It is a very good and complete survey on the LORAWAN technology. There are only some minor errors listed in the following:

"are to" at the row 170,

"an" in the row 190,

"that equivalent" row 214,

"Telensa" twice on row 263,

paragraph justify on rows 273-274,

"which using" row 338,

"enabling" row 341,

"40 dBm to 80 dBm" row 350 with the minus,

cancel "is" in row 358,

paragraph justify row 365,

"The signal" row 369,

"the" row 377,

table 1 page 10, insert the measuring unit for the LoRa bandwidth,

"receive" row 452,

"0.1 51" row 635,

"A different" row 637,

error in the numbering of 4.3,

row 750, "were" row 913,

"field" cup letter in row 934,

cancel one "and" in row 1038,

"Class D" in row 1089 should be Class C,

row 1143 last phrase seems uncompleted.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 

Thanks so much for your valuable comments. It's have been taken into consideration.

Please see the attachment.

Thanks again.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

 A Survey On LoRaWAN Technology: Recent Trends, Opportunities, Simulation Tools And Future Directions : The manuscript is a survey paper about the details about the Low-Power Wide Area Networks and their applications and comparison.  The topic is current, and it is well-written, and English grammar needs to improve

The authors should consider the following suggestions provided by the reviewer to improve the scientific depth of their manuscript. 

They should also address the following comments to improve the quality of the presentation of their manuscript.

1- The abstract is explanatory. 

2- Line 216:What is the unit of the “160” (path loss)

3- Line 233: Typo on space between number and unit “868.220MHz is “

4-  Line 233: “40 of them are reserved …”. Unit of the 40  is percentage or number of the channel ? 

5- Line 623: “…standard transmissions. while networks… ”

6- Line 676: “in comparison with the pure ALOHA..” Could be “save energy compared with the pure ALOHA … ”

7- Rephrase the sentences as “When optimising the SF and CF parameters of LoRa, it was necessary to consider the LoRaWAN network traffic to improve the DER while simultaneously reducing the packet collision rate and the amount of energy spent.”

8- The last sentence of the Conclusion is long. It would be better to rewrite the sentences.

9- Line 825: “”that (was) initiated in mid-2006 

10-Line 830: It is designed to be modular “should be ” It is modular and ”

11-Line 934:” MATLAB code. field test and”

12- Authors are recommended to have thoroughly proofread to avoid typos.

13- The literature could be strongly updated with some relevant and recent papers focused on the fields dealt with in the manuscript [1].

[1]  "An efficient transceiver design for superimposed waveforms with orthogonal polynomials," 2017 IEEE International Black Sea Conference on Communications and Networking (BlackSeaCom), 2017, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/BlackSeaCom.2017.8277657.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 

Thanks so much for your valuable comments. It's have been taken into consideration.

Please see the attachment.

Thanks again.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

General Comment:
The article gives a nice glance of creating a survey paper. I don't want to disappoint authors with the rejection but would like authors to take into consideration these comments and improve their manuscript and re-submit. The survey papers should be detailed and should give a future direction. At this point, this survey is directionless, lacks motivation and novelty.  Authors have claimed that it discussed opportunities and future directions but they are very limited. 

Comments:

1. The orientation of survey is not clear. The 4 determined topics should be discussed separately but in depth.

2. The quality of the figures is too low.

3.  Are these 5 simulators the only possible simulators abundantly used? authors should choose one of the performance metrics and compare its result in all 5. In Table 3, studies achieved by the simulator don't give any information.

4. What about the 3GPP compliance? There should be a sub-section discussion about 3gpp standardized research compliancy for these simulators. 

5. A very detailed literature review is expected in a survey. Authors should add this review in terms of a table comparing technology, performance metrics evaluated, pros and cons.

6. I am unable to pick the novelty of this survey paper. What is new this survey brings into the knowledge of the reader? 

7. The section about opportunities almost is nonexistent. It should be extended. The limitations should be discussed in detail too. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 

Thanks so much for your valuable comments. It's have been taken into consideration.

Please see the attachment.

Thanks again.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments have been addressed.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

Thank you

I revise the paper and the English revision is done.

Thanks again

Mukarram

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf