Resilient Localization and Coverage in the Internet of Things

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This article studies the effect of anchor misplacement in typical IoT settings, where sensors are randomly deployed, can be mobile and may belong to multiple providers. In their analysis the authors identify sensing coverage holes formed by anchor misplacement and analyze their presence and impact. A framework is proposed, through which the affected sensors nodes can be identified, and then remove the misplaced anchor nodes. Several experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal.

To the best of my knowledge, the proposal seems original. The article is structured in an adequate fashion (some important changes are in order, see IMPORTANT below). The introduction (Section 1) gives an overview of the research problem, providing the background and characterizing the problem and the primary research questions to be considered. The authors end Section 1 by detailing the contributions of the paper.  Section 2 presents preliminaries and the system model formulation. The text typesetting is confusing, and evidences that additional proofreading is mandatory  (there are messages such as “Error! Reference source not found” in page 7). The overall theoretical framework seems sound, and well formulated. Section 3 introduces the problem description, but as it stands it is too short (it should be structured or organized differently), having only one subsection with a list of bulleted items.  Section 4 and 5 introduce auxiliary results for analyzing Sensing coverage and an analysis on how to detect and define the bound of uncovered areas in DT (Delauney triangulation). Section 6 provides a deeper look at the effect of Anchor Misplacement when sensing coverage (page 16, Error Reference source not found again). Algorithm 3.1 has some inconsistencies (the three variables returned as output do not appear as variables in the program). Section 7 focuses on a “resiliency approach” for misplaced anchors. The beginning of the section sounds inconsistent (“In this article, we propose…”).  Again, in all sections the typesetting has severe problems (as different font sizes are used, centering is missing when required, etc.). Section 8 presents the results obtained and the associated conclusions. (page 23/25, error! reference not found again). The conclusions presented in Sec. 9 seem in line with the results previously discussed.

In summary, I think that the paper provides interesting contributions in the topic under research, but the overall structure of the article has severe deficiencies which require  major corrections in order to be solved. The methods are properly described, but the presentation has flaws which make difficult to follow the running text.  English language requires proofreading and checking (see IMPORTANT below).

IMPORTANT:  the overall presentation of the article needs considerable improvement, particularly related to typesetting and section organization. The authors use capital letters for subsections, which is not the typical notation for subsections in an article. Equations (e.g. pages 8 and 9) appear not centered in the text. Text corresponding to definitions and lemmas appear in a bigger font size than the running text (which is unusual in a journal writing style). In my opinion, the article requires a full proofreading.

Some English usage errors ( I list here just a few examples)

• and, hence, require “k” sensors to monitor →  remove quotations from k;  remove 2nd comma

• While the latter approach…. accuracy.  - > English grammar is wrong.

• Sections at the end of section 1 are referred to using I, II, III, while sections in the text using 1,2, 3…

• Section 2 starts with lowercase letter (preliminaries - > Preliminaries)

• but thinks it is in a different position - > the anchor node could be referred to as “assuming” to be in a different position, but not “thinking”.

• Whereas in this work, sensors … -> English grammar is wrong, this should be rewritten.

As discussed in the "Comments and Suggestions" sections, extensive English proofreading must be carried out. See remarks concerning the different elements involved. 

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The current work discusses the identification of sensing coverage holes resulting from anchor misplacement which is of vital importance in IoT applications.

The review of the literature is so limited and the introduction is made with many subsections which makes it long. Thus, the identification of the research problem is not necessarily valid. For example, there are recent research works on similar problems using machine learning.  

The engineering problem is converted into a purely mathematical problem. Therefore, experimental validation is needed, especially for a journal paper, where the validation of a hypothesis should be supported by experimental results.

The authors are advised to provide a flow chart showing their methodology.

Not all of the contributions are discussed.

Four references out of twenty-two are by the authors, which indicates an obvious self-citation.

The formatting of the paper is very poor and needs to be enhanced.

The paper is written in a very good English language.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

As I reviewer, I see that there are substantial imporvements in the article when compared with the original version. Some minor typos I would correct:

- Preliminaries, System model, and problem description

is not a good title for a section or subsection. Please rephrase accordingly.

The quality of English language has improved considerably wrt the original version of the article.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors made changes that enhanced the manuscript.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf