LECast: A Low-Energy-Consumption Broadcast Protocol for UAV Blockchain Networks

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper proposes a low-energy consumption protocol called LECast for blockchain broadcast in 6G and UAV networks. The paper also discusses the extension of Huffman coding to name the nodes more convenient way. The paper also discusses multichannel transmission with splitting data to address the security and privacy for broadcast communication. The energy consumption, latency, throughput, reliability, security and coverage rate are analyzed through simulations to validate the effectiveness of LECast.

There are some drawbacks of the paper as summarized below:

1.     The overall technical depth and novel contributions of the paper are limited. Please highlight better. 

2.     For SPB tree construction, it is specified that a 2-node network is considered, but Figures 4, 5 and Tables 1 and 2 have more than 2 nodes. Please clarify the inconsistencies in the description.

3.     The discussion in Section 4 is too high-level with no technical aspects.

4.     Please provide the intuition behind comparing the performance of LECast with Kadcat.

5.     Some minor comments

a.      Page 1, line 31, “EPLC” -> “ELPC”

b.     Page 3, line 84, please provide the full form of PBFT and S-PBFT when introducing it for the first time.

c.      Page 3, line 143 and line 147, please provide the full form of RELI and PoW.

d.     Page 5, lines 176 and 177, please cite the reference for Gossip and flooding.

e.      Page 5, line 180, a new line is started between “called” and “Kademlia”.

f.       Page 5, line 199, please clarify what this sentence means, “we choose to improve broadcast protocol in blockchain networks from the energy consumption”.

g.     Page 5, line 207, “between two nodes communication” -> “between two nodes”.

h.     Page 6, line 218, “According to the [32], and [33],” -> “According to [32] and [33].”

i.       Page 6, line 223, “By combination (1), (2), and (3)” -> “Combining 1, 2 and 3”.

j.       Page 8, line 259, This sentence seems incomplete “EHC is a refinement of Huffman coding. In [36].”.

k.     Page 8, line 264, Is it “n-nary” or “n-ary”?

l.       Page 11, line 389, Please provide the unit for throughput “7 for Bitcoin and around 15 for Ethereum.”

6.     Please discuss the limitations of the proposed LECast scheme and future research direction.

7.     The paper requires significant proof reading to address all the typographical and grammatical errors.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1. Proof read the entire article as grammatical issues and incomplete sentences can easily be seen.
For example on page 2, line 63, "For example, in Figure 1, the role of blockchain in data privacy protection for UAV power transmission line inspection and agricultural pesticide spraying. " is incomplete.

2. The authors have presented the concept of Green Blockchain for reduce energy emission. The concept is very interesting.
However, i would suggest the authors to include more about the blockchain implementation in the article as authors have their entire focus on "LECast".
Authors must align the implementation with the blockchain. Atleast Draw a figure showing the working of Drones using the Blockchain before the introduction of energy saving protocol.
and another figure showing the working with LeCast protocol.

Also, the performance evaluation metrics used are not relevant for the blockchain. Even for throughput, authors have clearly mentioned of not to considering it for blokchain.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

My comments have been properly addressed and I have no further comments.