Secure Transmission for Buffer-Aided Relay Networks in the Internet of Things
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Some minor changes can improve this paper. Some recommendations are listed bellow:
It should be given a reference for the binomial theorem;
more details should be given about the closed form expression of the secrecy outage probability for the NCE and CE scenarios;
Some proofs can be more detailed in a an annex;
in eq. (50) the comma should be replaced by a dot.
it should clarified why the Nj outperforms the SCJ at low transmit power;
in lines 282 and 283 is not clear which search solution is used.
A minor revision should be done to improve the text quality.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper explores the problem of the secure transmission for buffer-aided relay IoT network. Authors adopted the max-link relay selection policy to enhance the secrecy performance of the system. They proposed three secure transmission schemes and evaluated their secrecy performance using the theory of Markov chains. Theoretical results were validated through Monte-Carlo simulation.
This is a well-written paper and includes some nice ideas. The performance evaluation is comprehensive, but to improve the clearness of the paper I suggest to include the table with the main notations and parameters of the mathematical model.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The article addresses an interesting topic, that has been seen many activity in recent years. The proposed methods can prove to be adequate transmission schemes in a IoT environment.
The proposed schemes are well presented, provide sufficient details and the simulations offer a good overview of their performances. Still, there are some aspects that need to be taken into account:
in the simulations, a fix period of 1 time slot is considered for the link between the sensors and the relay. If multiple nodes send data in the same time slot to the same relay, what happens if the relay does not process all incoming packets? Does the node retransmits the data or it considered to be a negligent loss? the simulations are based on the power budget or power allocation, but there is no analysis regarding the energy consumption for sensors and relays, for each proposed transmission scheme. the simulations and theoretical formulas offer some degree of knowledge about the performance of the proposed schemes, but a physical test in a real-life scenario would offer good validation, considering that there can be multiple sources of jamming or interference. Will the transmission schemes behave in the same manner in a real-world scenario? Can these "perturbations" be introduced in the simulation, in case a physical test is not possible?Regarding the format of the paper, there are minor words misplacement or lack of punctuation that the authors should address before publication. There are also some extra marks in the text (e.g. pages 8-11 contain some extra squares at the end of some paragraphs).
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Through their responses and changes in the paper, the authors have addressed the main points mentioned in the previous review.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is quite well researched and structured. I liked the problem definition and the mathematical representation.
The SCJ-PA scheme is well described and analyzed.
Reviewer 2 Report
In this paper the authors investigate the secure transmission for buffer-aided relay networks in the IoT in the presence of multiple passive eavesdroppers. Authors propose three security schemes.
Authors described the schemes well in the paper, provided good results and evidence for their desgin.
Good Job.
