A Novel Approach for the Enhancement of Security through Defining the Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability in the Industrial Internet of Things

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. Regarding ‘Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability (SRM-SSOP)’ in line 11 of the article, is there any words stands for SRM in the acronym? Please check the whole paper to make sure that there is no similar error.

2、Please add DOI numbers to the references and make sure that the contents of the article have been correctly cited.

3. There is a lack of a summary of the article's contributions in Section 1.

4, In the section 4 of the article for the analysis of data, it is suggested that it can be divided into two subsections, respectively, about SSOP and total throughput, and then subdivided. And in section 4.1 it has been concluded that the antenna array direction adjusted to the direction of Bob's normal direction can improve the security,  why this point of view is repeated in the section 4.3 and 4.4 ?

5、Section 4.5-4.7 is the part of the study of system throughput, but the paper lacks modelling or formulae for throughput calculation, please add a detailed theoretical part.

6、What exactly does the reference to a non-adaptive coding transmission scheme in section 4.5 mean? I don't see any description of it in the text.

7. In section 4.6, for the comparison between SRM-SSOP and ADP, in the case of Epsilon=0.1, the performance of ADP is better than that of the proposed method at low power, and the difference between the two is not very big at high power, so what is the advantage of the proposed method in this paper? There can also can give different “Epsilon” value of the simulation of the two methods for comparison.

8, The paper analysis the effect of different parameters of Bob, and the conclusion is reached of telling the reader that the antenna array normal to the direction of Bob could lead to the best performance (i.e.,  theta b= 0), then how about the effect of Eve in this situation?

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments with regard to the Manuscript electronics-3028260, entitled “A Novel Approach for Enhancement of Security through Defining Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability in Industrial Internet of Things”. We greatly appreciate your insightful comments and your great efforts in handling our manuscript.

We have already carefully read the comments from the system, and revised the manuscript according to your constructive suggestions. All these changes have been marked in red color. We hope this revision will make our manuscript more acceptable.

The responses to your comments point by point are listed as below. Please feel free to contact us with any questions and we are looking forward to your further consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This work aims to employ the physical layer of wireless communication, using antenna parameters and location simulation, to reduce failures and attacks inside the Industrial Internet of Things.

 

The recommendations are: 

             

1.     Figure 1 is not clear, and the legends are not readable.

2.   For simulation, the case scenario is missing. Please clarify the scenario; an image could be added to exemplify it.

3.  What equipment characteristics were used for the simulation and the algorithm? An academic paper should provide enough information to be replicated.

4.     Lines 265 to 267, “Given our knowledge of the channel information for the legitimate channel in practical communication scenarios, it becomes possible to strategically design the optimal transmission rate based on theoretical insights, aiming to attain the highest achievable system throughput.” This should be rewritten; it is not clear. 

5.     A Discussion section is missing that compares the results obtained in Section 4 with those of other works, such as [1,2]. 

[1] Y. Zhang, R. Woods, Y. Ko, A. Marshall and J. Zhang, "Security Optimization of Exposure Region-Based Beamforming With a Uniform Circular Array," in IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 66, no. 6, pp. 2630-2641, June 2018, doi: 10.1109/TCOMM.2017.2768516.

[2] Y. Zhang, Y. Ko, R. Woods and A. Marshall, "Defining Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability for Exposure Region-Based Beamforming," in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 900-912, Feb. 2017, doi: 10.1109/TWC.2016.2633351.

6. In the Introduction, the second paragraph should be rewritten. It is almost exactly some published papers text. The same for the 2. System Model first paragraph and the Conclusion Section.    

7.  Provide the future work.

8. The English in the text needs to be revised. Some sentences are hard to understand, and there are many punctuation errors.   

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Some sentences are hard to understand, and there are many punctuation errors.   

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments with regard to the Manuscript electronics-3028260, entitled “A Novel Approach for Enhancement of Security through Defining Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability in Industrial Internet of Things”. We greatly appreciate your insightful comments and your great efforts in handling our manuscript.

We have already carefully read the comments from the system, and revised the manuscript according to your constructive suggestions. All these changes have been marked in red color. We hope this revision will make our manuscript more acceptable.

The responses to your comments point by point are listed as below. Please feel free to contact us with any questions and we are looking forward to your further consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

This study mainly investigated a passive eavesdropping system numerical model in wireless communication to reduce the risk of interruptions from physical layer failures/attacks. Here’re some questions and suggestions.  

1.       The authors mentioned that many technologies existing for enhancing physical layer security, such as beamforming. It is recommended to expand more discussions on other frequently used methods, like cooperative jamming, artificial noise generation, and other physical layer key generation methods. And in the later part, validate the merits of the proposed model compared with these as-mentioned methods (e.g., comes along with a comparison table).

2.       Extra descriptions and annotations should be added to Figure 2 for better clarity, e.g., what are the meaning for red dotted-lines (inside and outside regions), and from which Eq. the red lines come.

3.       Please justify the reasons to adopt Jensens Inequality for solving the as-mentioned obstacles in the expression (11). Also, as for the path loss exponent, making it equal to 2 is an ideal situation. What happens if the value is not 2, i.e., could this proposed numerical model handle other more common situations.

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments with regard to the Manuscript electronics-3028260, entitled “A Novel Approach for Enhancement of Security through Defining Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability in Industrial Internet of Things”. We greatly appreciate your insightful comments and your great efforts in handling our manuscript.

We have already carefully read the comments from the system, and revised the manuscript according to your constructive suggestions. All these changes have been marked in red color. We hope this revision will make our manuscript more acceptable.

The responses to your comments point by point are listed as below. Please feel free to contact us with any questions and we are looking forward to your further consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper titled "A Novel Approach for Enhancement of Security through Defining Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability in Industrial Internet of Things" proposes a mechanism to enhance physical layer security in IIoT communication through the definition of Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability (SSOP). The SSOP algorithm assumes known locations of legitimate devices and random distributions of eavesdroppers, forming a model of insecure and secure regions. By optimizing transmission rates or controlling power, the system throughput can be maximized, thus reducing resource consumption. While the results show the algorithm's efficacy in simulation, the paper needs improvement in several aspects.

1. In Section 2, can you provide a more detailed explanation or visual representation of the SSOP model's assumptions, especially regarding the distribution of eavesdroppers and how these assumptions impact the model's applicability in real-world IIoT scenarios?
2. Table 5 illustrates the relationship between system throughput and transmission power. How were the specific power levels chosen, and what is their significance in a practical industrial setting? Can you provide more context on the selection of these parameters?
3. Section 3 introduces the SSOP algorithm. Can you analyze the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm compared to existing methods? How does the complexity scale with the number of antennas (N) and the number of eavesdroppers?
4. In Figure 4, you show the relationship between averaged SSOP and different values of N. How would the system performance be affected in a scenario where the number of eavesdroppers significantly exceeds the number of legitimate devices? How resilient is the system to sudden changes in the network topology?
5. In Section 4.1, the impact of Bob's different values of θb on p̄ssop is discussed. Can you describe the real-world experimental setup used to validate these simulations? What environmental factors were considered, and how do they affect the results?

Comments on the Quality of English Language

 Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments with regard to the Manuscript electronics-3028260, entitled “A Novel Approach for Enhancement of Security through Defining Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability in Industrial Internet of Things”. We greatly appreciate your insightful comments and your great efforts in handling our manuscript.

We have already carefully read the comments from the system, and revised the manuscript according to your constructive suggestions. All these changes have been marked in red color. We hope this revision will make our manuscript more acceptable.

The responses to your comments point by point are listed as below. Please feel free to contact us with any questions and we are looking forward to your further consideration.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This version has responded to the previous comments. I suggest accepting it.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

 Minor editing of English language required.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

There are no more comments from the reviewer.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are still some things that need to be fixed. Section 4.2.2 should use the items in the enumeration to read clearly. Many white spaces are missing. Also, the Equation in line 280 is out of the text.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thanks for solving my questions and concerns, and now the manuscript is of better quality.

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

accept