Review Reports - An Internet of Things-Based Low-Power Integrated Beekeeping Safety and Conditions Monitoring System

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper talks about a holistic management and control system for the bee and apiculture industry (Integrated Beekeeping System of holistic Management and Control- IBSMC. This integrated beehive array system mainly focuses on the regulation of bees living conditions, targeting on both minimizing bee swarm mortality and maximizing productivity. Within the proposed IBSMC system architecture, additional security functionalities are implemented for bee monitoring, low energy consumption and incidents response.

Major Comments:

I would suggest authors to change the title. The new title should be like “An Internet of Things based low power Integrated Beekeeping safety and conditions monitoring system”. I recommend the authors to follow the MDPI’s proper Introduction format. Currently, Introduction is too long and it distract the reader’s attention. The introduction should briefly place the study in a broad context and highlight why it is important. It should define the purpose of the work and its significance, including specific hypotheses being tested. Finally, briefly mention the main aim of the work and highlight the main conclusions. Keep the introduction comprehensible to scientists working outside the topic of the paper. Without the real time implementation, experimentation, and performance evaluation it’s quite difficult to predict the results of the present study. From lines 599 to 606, if everything is in future work or under development then currently this study has major flaws and it has no practical implications. Briefly describe the limitations of the “low power Integrated Beekeeping safety and conditions monitoring system” at the end of conclusion section.

Author Response

Major Comments:
C1: I would suggest authors to change the title. The new title should be like “An Internet of Things based low power Integrated Beekeeping safety and conditions monitoring system”.
R1: The word Proposed in title has been replaced with An Internet of Things based.

C2: I recommend the authors to follow the MDPI’s proper Introduction format. Currently, Introduction is too long and it distract the reader’s attention. The introduction should briefly place the study in a broad context and highlight why it is important.
R2: Significant changes have been made to Introduction section. Specifically, paper organization, and short presentation of the proposed system capabilities with respect to existing solutions have been added. Introduction has also been reduced in size by movie the temperature-humidity conditions and their affect the beehives paragraphs to section 3.1, where temperature and humidity control actuators are presented as part of the new beehive arrays.

C3: It should define the purpose of the work and its significance, including specific hypotheses being tested.
R3: Purpose and significance of this work has been added at section 3. Furthermore, comparison with existing solutions with additional comparison summary table of functionalities has been added at related work section.

C4: Finally, briefly mention the main aim of the work and highlight the main conclusions.
R4: Additional paragraph that highlights out proposed work aim and main conclusions has been added in the conclusions section.

C5: Keep the introduction comprehensible to scientists working outside the topic of the paper. Without the real time implementation, experimentation, and performance evaluation it’s quite difficult to predict the results of the present study. From lines 599 to 606,if everything is in future work or under development then currently this study has major flaws and it has no practical implications. Briefly describe the limitations of the “low power Integrated Beekeeping safety and conditions monitoring system” at the end of conclusion section.
R5: A new section 4 with proposed system experimental scenarios and results has been added.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper proposes Integrated Beekeeping System of holistic Management and Control- IBSMC, a management and control system for the bee and apiculture industry. The proposed idea is interesting. The paper is well written with good introduction and appropriate sections. Results and Discussion is also well presented. The reviewer has few suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.

Please cite the references in numerical order starting from [1] in the text. The paper has few grammatical errors, please correct them and do one more round of proofreading. What is the novelty of the proposed system? Explain its as a separate paragraph at the end of the Introduction section. Include organization of the paper in the Introduction section. Insert a table in the related work section comparing all the existing systems with the proposed system. Compare using various parameters and highlight the disadvantages with the existing systems. Some information on providing security in the proposed IoT based system needs to be discussed. Refer the papers "A secure inter-domain communication for IoT devices" and "A Secure and Efficient Lightweight Symmetric Encryption Scheme for Transfer of Text Files between Embedded IoT Devices" and include a discussion in section 3.2 Include a section Result and Discussion (Its very important). You can check various performance parameters and can plot graphs with respect to time or any other variable. Include the live results and discuss. Include discussion on Future work

Author Response

C1: Please cite the references in numerical order starting from [1] in the text. The paper has few grammatical errors, please correct them and do one more round of proofreading.
R1: Numerical order of citations is set in alphabetical order in the References section. The paper has been revised and grammatically corrected by the author.

C2: What is the novelty of the proposed system? Explain its as a separate paragraph at the end of the Introduction section. Include organization of the paper in the Introduction section.
R2:A paragraph that presents the novelty of the IBSMC system has been added at the end of the Introduction section, as well as a paper organization paragraph.

C3: Insert a table in the related work section comparing all the existing systems with the proposed system. Compare using various parameters and highlight the disadvantages with the existing systems.
R3: An appropriate comparison table of existing technologies with the proposed system has been added.

C4: Some information on providing security in the proposed IoT based system needs to be discussed. Refer the papers "A secure inter-domain communication for IoT devices" and "A Secure and Efficient Lightweight Symmetric Encryption Scheme for Transfer of Text Files between Embedded IoT Devices" and include a discussion
R4: Information on providing security of the proposed system has been added in section 3 Proposed IBSMC system architecture III (last paragraph) (IV last paragraph). References have been added as highlighted in red at the References section.

C5: in section 3.2 Include a section Result and Discussion (Its very important). You can check various performance parameters and can plot graphs with respect to time or any other variable. Include the live results and discuss. Include discussion on Future work.
R5: A new section 4 with proposed system experimental scenarios and results has been added. Also a separate paragraph in the conclusions section has been added summarising the proposed system capabilities and another one for the experimentation conclusions and proposed system's novelty.