Trustworthy Transaction Spreading Using Node Reliability Estimation in IoT Blockchain Networks

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors presented an interesting Q-learning framework and graph convergence network to search for the proper spreading path of each transaction in a blockchain network. The authors validated the proposed trustworthy transaction spreading in an InterPlanetary File system and showed the practicability of the proposed method.

I think overall the paper is well structured and the authors demonstrated their mechanism in a good way. To realize the method in real blockchain network, I would like the authors to show more results and comparison of the performance, such as the overall latency of the algorithm, the energy usage of the hardware.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Summary

The paper presents a trustworthy transaction spreading method that incorporates a Q-learning framework and graph convergence network (GCN) to search for the proper spreading path of each transaction for practical sharing to dynamic IoT blockchain networks.

The authors provided both the implementation of their proposal over an Inter Planetary File system (IPFS) and experiments that confirm the practicability of the proposed mechanism.

 

Pros:

- The paper is well-written and easy to read.

-  The topic is of interest to different communities.

- The paper provides the description of details of the proposed approach, i.e., the process of trustworthy transaction spreading,

- The paper provides experiments that show the applicability of their proposal by constructing a test blockchain network in an IPFS testbed. It provides a comparison with random spreading and gossip techniques.

Cons:

-    Section 2 presents previous works by illustrating several interesting scientific contributions; however, the authors lack positioning their work. Please clarify how your work differs from the current state-of-the-art and refer more to results close to yours.

-     It is not fully clear to me the contribution of the authors. Section 3 creates confusion because it contains both the background (subsection 3.1) and the authors’ contributions (subsection 3.2). But it seems that the last subsection describes the problem to be addressed and details the requirements of a possible general solution. Please refactor section 3 by clearly distinguishing your contribution from the background. I would also suggest anticipating that background before related works (presented in section 2) to facilitate non-expert readers to understand the state-of-the-art, the limitation of the previous studies, and the scientific advancement of your contributions.

-        Figure 4 is hard to understand at first look. In the sense that the flow to follow is not clear to understand the depicted process, i.e., the process of trustworthy transaction spreading. Please enumerate the steps and reformulate the text describing the process using that enumeration. Please also use that enumeration throughout the whole of Section 4.

Judgement:

The proposed study put forward in the paper is interesting. However, to fully appreciate the novelty of the proposal, it is necessary, in my opinion, to position the proposed work with respect to the state-of-the-art and to clarify the authors’ contributions.

Minor:

- General Comment: please define acronyms, such as GCN, the first time you use them

- Page 3, line 115, please harmonize the reference to [15] by removing the word “Ref.” in the sentence “A multilayered IoT blockchain architecture was proposed in Ref.[25]. The proposed 115 architecture introduces a less complex blockchain software to configure practical IoT networks.”

-  Line 117 “A similar architecture was proposed in [26]. They presented the use of cloud- and fog-computing architectures to deploy blockchain software.”  They refer to whom? Maybe authors of [16]. Please clarify.     

-   Line 140, please specify what IOST is

-    Figure 1 seems to be taken from the available literature. Please cite the source of that picture properly and explicitly report that you are adopting the figure from it.

-     Please cite the text properly from line 166 to line 174.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have adequately incorporated the reviews' main comments in the revised manuscript. By clarifying their contribution and reorganizing the content, I think the current version appears good and is ready for publication. Therefore, I have no further comments.