Anti-Jamming Low-Latency Channel Hopping Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper looks interesting. The topic is important and timely. I have the following comments:
1) It is recommended to include more quantitative data in the abstract section. Problem statement and rationale should also be included in this section.
2) Please add more content about the application of the proposed approach on other fields of engineering such as cyber-physical power systems. Can the proposed technique be utilized in wireless communication systems to make a safe platform to control the assets of a smart microgrid? What are the limitations? What are the challenges? Useful references: 10.1109/IGESSC55810.2022.9955337; 10.1109/TSG.2023.3253431, etc.
3) Please provide more information about the limitations of the study?
4) What are the merits/demerits of the proposed approach with respect to the available alternatives in the existing literature?
Author Response
Response to Reviewer #1
“1) It is recommended to include more quantitative data in the abstract section. Problem statement and rationale should also be included in this section.”
Response: We appreciate the suggestion of the reviewer. The more quantitative data, the problem to be solved rationale are addressed in the abstract section. Specifically, the channel hopping matrices designed by existing methods still have room for improvement. To overcome the difficulty of guaranteeing communication between any pair of users, while also providing protection against jamming attacks and minimizing the time to rendezvous (TTR) in a CRN, this paper presents the Anti-jamming Low-Latency channel hopping (ALL) protocol. Based on the simulation results, the ALL protocol performs better than the recently-proposed practical solution OLAA by up to 33% in network throughput and 30% in TTR. On average, ALL outperforms OLAA by 25% in network throughput and 20% in TTR.
The statements mentioned above have been included in the abstract section.
“2) Please add more content about the application of the proposed approach on other fields of engineering such as cyber-physical power systems. Can the proposed technique be utilized in wireless communication systems to make a safe platform to control the assets of a smart microgrid? What are the limitations? What are the challenges? Useful references: 10.1109/IGESSC55810.2022.9955337; 10.1109/TSG.2023.3253431, etc.”
Response: To clarify the potential application of the proposed anti-jamming techniques, we have included additional descriptions in this revised version. In particular, we have added the following statements to the second-to-last paragraph in Section I.
It should be emphasized that anti-jamming techniques have broad application in fields involving wireless communication [31], such as military communications, satellite communications, and cyber-physical systems. For example, in cyber-physical power systems, where physical and digital components are integrated to optimize power generation and distribution, dependable and secure communication is vital [32]. Hence, anti-jamming approaches could be relevant in this field to ensure communication channel integrity and availability.
“3) Please provide more information about the limitations of the study?”
Response: Shortening the ID of SUs is advantageous for the ALL protocol, but it also results in multiple nodes having the same or similar shortened IDs. This could cause issues as nodes with identical shortened IDs may not be able to meet and thus a user cannot transmit data to another user with the same ID. This constraint may pose a challenge in a network that is not densely populated. To resolve this issue, it may be beneficial to not significantly reduce the ID length. However, determining the appropriate ID length requires further exploration. We have addressed the limitation of ALL in Section VI.
“4) What are the merits/demerits of the proposed approach with respect to the available alternatives in the existing literature??”
Response: As far as we know, OLAA_T and OLAA_R currently demonstrate the most effective performance among the available anti-jamming channel hopping protocols. The ALL protocol is constructed using OLAA_T as its basis and incorporates the benefits of OLAA_T, including the capacity to modify channel usage frequency and the T/R frame ratio. A number of approaches have been suggested to improve the efficiency of OLAA and LAA.
As to the demerit of ALL, as previously mentioned, the ALL protocol may face limitations in a network with low node density due to the use of shortened IDs, which could result in nodes with identical IDs being unable to communicate, leading to potential issues with data transmission.
Reviewer 2 Report
In the paper, anti-jamming channel hopping protocol named ALL has been proposed for rendezvous guarantee in cognitive radio networks. The proposed method has been compared with counterparts. The paper is well-organized. The idea is good. A few questions can be answered.
If there were some primary users in the environment, would the performance of the proposed algorithm changed?
Also, there are some minor writting/spelling errors in the paper. Please control all paper.
Figure titles/writings have to be controlled.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer #2
“If there were some primary users in the environment, would the performance of the proposed algorithm changed?"
Response: In this revised version, we have added simulations to explore how the different protocols are impacted by varying numbers of PUs. We found that the performance of all three protocols remains consistent across different numbers of PUs, with ALL demonstrating noticeably superior results compared to OLAA_T and OLAA_R. The average packet delivery ratios achieved by ALL, OLAA_T, and OLAA_R under different numbers of PUs are 75%, 64%, and 65%, respectively. It is worth noting that when the number of PUs is set to four, the maximum packet delivery ratio achievable by an SU running ALL, OLAA_T, and OLAA_R is 82%, 72%, and 71%, respectively. This experiment confirms that ALL is resilient and not adversely affected by an increase in PUs. The statements mentioned above have been included in Section V.
“Also, there are some minor writting/spelling errors in the paper. Please control all paper.
Figure titles/writings have to be controlled."
Response: After a thorough review of the paper, we have carefully corrected any grammatical errors and typos that were identified. The labels of the figures have been modified for improved clarity and accuracy. We believe that the revised paper is now more readable and understandable.
Reviewer 3 Report
1. The overall manuscript organization is not presented in the introduction.
2. The manuscript needs thorough proofreading as there are a few grammatical and punctuation mistakes.
3. Fig 4-10 images are getting blurred in many places; authors are suggested only to consider high-quality photos. Few measures are not properly visible.
4. On page no 4 the authors mentioned Langford paring. In both places the citations don't match, now can the authors clarify which is the actual source of data used for experimentation?
5. The authors have not explained anything about the experimentation environment.
The literature review is weak, the authors have not considered any works from 2023 during working in this area.
6. The method classifies into binary outcome. The proposed model is compare with other models in terms of Accuracy, loss, etc. For fine tuning, there is still room for improvement.
7. It is not convincing as proper Algorithm for bottleneck topology is not mentioned in the methodology section. All the theoretical description of several methods is unnecessary.
8. Authors are suggested to concentrate only on the proposed method.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer #3
“1. The overall manuscript organization is not presented in the introduction.”
Response: The organization of the paper has been described and added to the end of Section I. Specifically, the rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we provide a review of the current solutions for the rendezvous problem. Section III introduces the Preliminary and System Model, while Section IV describes the proposed solution. In Section V, we present the simulation results, and in Section VI, we provide the conclusions and discuss future work.
“2. The manuscript needs thorough proofreading as there are a few grammatical and punctuation mistakes.”
Response: After a thorough review of the paper, we have carefully corrected any grammatical errors and typos that were identified. We believe that the revised paper is now more readable and understandable.
“3. Fig 4-10 images are getting blurred in many places; authors are suggested only to consider high-quality photos. Few measures are not properly visible.”
Response: To improve the visibility of the data, we have made adjustments to Fig. 4-10. The modified figures now provide a clear representation of the data.
“4. On page no 4 the authors mentioned Langford paring. In both places the citations don't match, now can the authors clarify which is the actual source of data used for experimentation?”
Response: We would like to express our gratitude to the reviewer for bringing this matter to our attention. As per the reviewer's suggestion, we have updated the reference for Extended Langford pairing to [33]. It's worth noting that the reference for Langford pairing remains unchanged and is now cited as [34, 35].
“5. The authors have not explained anything about the experimentation environment.
The literature review is weak, the authors have not considered any works from 2023 during working in this area.”
Response: We have described all the parameters used in the simulation environment in this revision. Two specific parameters have been stated: there are eight PU, and the idle and busy periods follow an exponential distribution with a mean of two time slots each. The description has been added at the first paragraph of Section V.
As of 2023, we have not come across new anti-jamming channel hopping protocols that have been proposed. Nevertheless, we have included two references from 2023 in Section I.
“6. The method classifies into binary outcome. The proposed model is compare with other models in terms of Accuracy, loss, etc. For fine tuning, there is still room for improvement.”
Response: In this revised version, we have included extra simulations to strengthen the validation of the proposed protocol. Based on the newly incorporated findings, it is apparent that ALL outperforms OLAA_T and OLAA_R in terms of packet delivery ratio. Specifically, we have added simulations to explore how the different protocols are impacted by varying numbers of PUs. We found that the performance of all three protocols remains consistent across different numbers of PUs, with ALL demonstrating noticeably superior results compared to OLAA_T and OLAA_R. The average packet delivery ratios achieved by ALL, OLAA_T, and OLAA_R under different numbers of PUs are 75%, 64%, and 65%, respectively. It is worth noting that when the number of PUs is set to four, the maximum packet delivery ratio achievable by an SU running ALL, OLAA_T, and OLAA_R is 82%, 72%, and 71%, respectively. This experiment confirms that ALL is resilient and not adversely affected by an increase in PUs. The statements mentioned above have been included in Section V.
“7. It is not convincing as proper Algorithm for bottleneck topology is not mentioned in the methodology section. All the theoretical description of several methods is unnecessary.”
Response: The bottleneck topology is employed to demonstrate the influence of diverse traffic loads on users, and according to simulation results, LAA performs exceptionally well in this scenario [20]. The ALL protocol is developed based on OLAA_T, which is an extension of LAA. Therefore, ALL retains the advantageous features of both OLAA_T and LAA, such as the ability to detect and adapt to varying loads.
To address the challenge of ensuring rendezvous between any pair of users, while also providing resistance to jamming attacks and reducing the TTR as much as possible in a CRN, in this paper, we propose the ALL protocol. Theorem 1 verifies that ALL provides a rendezvous between a sender and its designated receiver. We consider the theoretical description helps to address that ALL meets the requirement of rendezvous guarantee.
“8. Authors are suggested to concentrate only on the proposed method.”
Response: Additional simulations have been carried out to confirm the benefits of utilizing the ALL protocol instead of OLAA_T and OLAA_R. Furthermore, this revised version includes several example scenarios to emphasize the significance of the proposed approach. The depiction and validation of the suggested protocol have been improved.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have satisfactorily addressed the comments/suggestions. The revised version of the paper is substantially improved. Hence, I have no further comments at this point. Good luck with the future steps of this research!
Reviewer 3 Report
The revised paper has been improved .
