Classification of Actual Sensor Network Deployments in Research Studies from 2013 to 2017
, Artis Mednis, Valters Abolins, Ansis Skadins, Didzis Lapsa, Raimonds Rava, Maksims Ivanovs and Krisjanis Nesenbergs *,†Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
A remarkable amount of teamwork and technical expertise went into performing the research that culminated in the present paper. The authors presented a very rich dataset, laboriously built, and described every step involved in collecting, classifying, and compiling the data in a meaningful way that is easily accessible for further research.
However, in some aspects, this study could be complemented and better developed. These will be further discussed in the next paragraphs.
In section 2, data visualization could be achieved more effectively with more pictures/tables to illustrate the data structures adopted.
Observe the following excerpt taken from the abstract:
“To highlight trends and developments in these technologies and to see whether they are actually deployed rather than subjects of theoretical research with presumed potential use cases, we gathered and codified a dataset of scientific publications from a 5-year period from 2013 to 2017 involving actual sensor network deployments[...]"
The excerpt suggests that what motivated the research was 1) gain insight on the proportion of actual network deployments (in contrast to theoretical studies and simulations) and 2) to highlight trends and developments in the field. In the summary, the authors also state that they aim at gathering “[...]the available information about actual WSN and IoT deployments used by the research community”, and at present “[...]an overview about trends from the 5-year period from 2013-2017[...]"
The authors then list the criteria used to classify each of the articles and how the papers were screened and further analyzed. Notwithstanding, the study has no conclusion, discussion of the results, or any section dedicated to the discussion of past and present trends, or to hypothesize future trends based on the collected data, as was expected from the information contained in the abstract and opening section of the study. This inconsistency could be corrected if the aforementioned sections were to be developed.
It could also be greatly beneficial to include in the dataset the impact factor or other form(s) of citation analysis for each journal in which the articles included in the dataset were published since those metrics could help achieve the objective pursued by the authors of detecting trends with better accuracy.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript organizes the data set to find out the comparison between actual and theoretical deployment of WSN and IoT network. As per the guideline of MDPI data, the manuscript can be ready for publication.
Author Response
Thank You for the review!
As the review does not require any response or additional modifications to the manuscript, no modificiations are done based on this review.
Reviewer 3 Report
- This is an interesting work but it is much non-technical related content.
- It will be interesting to have some results on the classification of works on WSN placement, multi-hop transmission, WSN resource allocation or power control, performance on success data delivery, etc from 2013 to 2017.
- Please improve the clarity of the figures
- Add some more reference, it is very minimum for the journal.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I suggest that the authors improve the figures, and add more current scientific publications, such as publications from the year 2019.
Author Response
Thank You for Your review - our answers to the review points follow:
1) I suggest that the authors improve the figures
Response: to improve the figures, we require more information what in the figures is not up to standard and could be improved. Current images are up to resolution standards required by the Journal to the best of our knowledge, thus we cannot comply without more specific details.
2) add more current scientific publications, such as publications from the year 2019
Response: None of the references used in the document are older than 2019, so no change is needed. If the reviewer refers to publications provided in the data set itself, those describe a specific systematic experiment with a specific scope from 2013 to 2017 and as this experiment has concluded, no additional years can be added. It is our plan to continue with a similar effort for the next 5 years (2018 - 2022) but that will be a separate result and published separately when such data will be collected and processed.
