Underwater Biomimetic Covert Acoustic Communications Mimicking Multiple Dolphin Whistles
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I have read your paper and I find it very interesting. Here are my comments to accept the paper with some minor comments:
- The paper addresses a challenging and important problem of underwater covert communication, which has many potential applications in military and civilian domains.
- The paper proposes a novel method that mimics multiple dolphin whistles, which are known to be highly covert and efficient in underwater environments.
- The paper provides a detailed theoretical analysis and design of the proposed method, as well as extensive experimental results to validate its performance and covertness.
- The paper compares the proposed method with conventional underwater covert communication methods, and shows that the proposed method achieves higher data rate, better bit error rate, and larger covertness to real dolphin group whistles.
- The paper is well-written, clear, and concise. The figures and tables are informative and relevant. The references are adequate and up-to-date.
Some minor comments are:
- It would be helpful to provide some background information on dolphin whistles, such as their characteristics, functions, and variations, in the introduction section.
- It would be interesting to discuss the limitations and challenges of the proposed method, such as the impact of environmental noise, multipath propagation, and dolphin detection on the covertness and performance of the communication.
- It would be beneficial to compare the proposed method with other biomimetic communication methods that use different animal sounds, such as whale songs or fish choruses, in terms of covertness and data rate.
I recommend accepting this paper for publication, as it presents a significant contribution to the field of underwater covert communication. I hope that the authors can address these minor comments in their revised version.
Author Response
Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript.
Please see the attachment.
Best regards.
Yongcheol Kim.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
It is recommended that the authors perform a thorough analysis to evaluate the potential impact of the proposed method on energy consumption.
Please provide additional information regarding the Degree of mimic (DOM) evaluation analysis for the proposed methodology.
Could you provide more details on why it is preferable to demodulate one of the methods first in a way that is not influenced by the other decoding method when determining the decoding sequence between TFSK and CV-CFM?
It would be greatly appreciated if the authors could provide more detailed information on the demodulation process, particularly regarding implementing different demodulation schemes in the presence or absence of interference. This clarification is especially relevant following TFSK demodulation and prior to decoding the phase-modulated values of CV-CFM.
I kindly request further information regarding the parameters and configurations utilized in the proposed method. Specifically, the choice of the carrier frequency for CV-CFM, the values of ∆f for TFSK, the number of segments for frequency shift modulation, and the underlying rationale for setting different spreading code lengths to conduct experiments. Your response to these inquiries would be greatly appreciated.
To improve the work's effectiveness, I recommended expanding the conclusion section by incorporating part of the information gathered from the experiment results.
Author Response
Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript.
Please see the attachment
Best regards,
Yongcheol Kim.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This is a good article, however also CSS communication is a good modulation to use wideband in a variety of environments....could be writted.
SNR results are not good, high noise. Doppler shift occurred in your experiment?
In my opinion is important long-range performance communication, like: 10 km to 100 km
Author Response
Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript.
Please see the attachment
Best regards,
Yongcheol Kim.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
