Clustering-Based Channel Allocation Method for Mitigating Inter-WBAN Interference

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors have presented WBAN interference mitigation research work in this article, and have proposed a dynamic frequency allocation clustering method to reduce the inter WBAN interference. The authors present the related work in this reference, however, some references are quite old, and newer references may please be added or replaced for the older ones cited by the authors. The most relevant work cited by the authors is Ref 24.  Authors are advised to describe in detail the differences of the proposed work and compare the results from [24].

Secondly, there are numerous typos and spelling mistakes that need to be corrected, therefore a thorough review of the language needs to be carried out before the article is accepted for publication. The attached file indicates some of these.

Thirdly, the authors need to describe the computational complexity of the proposed method, which they claim is lower but do not describe it in detail. 

Fourthly, the authors need to define the limits of the proposed work, in the scenario, the number of WBANs increase beyond that assumed, how would the proposed algorithm behave? How would the interference increase and can it be handled by allocating channels simply through FDMA?

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript presented the Clustering-Based Channel Allocation Method for Mitigating Inter wireless body area network (WBAN) Interference. In this paper, authors propose a dynamic channel allocation method to mitigate the inter-WBAN interference. To accomplish the goal, we reduce the amount of interference between the WBANs using the same channel by adopting a graph partitioning method and a graph coloring method. Issues are associated with the manuscript before further processing.

1. Abstract can be written in more comprehensive and focused manner. Abstract, summarize the numerical results of proposed work, and discuss how it outperforms existing works.

2. Related work is mentioned by the authors but it should be mentioned in a critical way by highlighting the comparative analysis in tabular manner. What are the unique features of this study compared to the existing works?

3. A ‘Research Gap’ section should incorporate which will states the purpose of the study.

4. Contributions should be highlighted in bullet points and justified.

5. Authors mentioned that the existing channel allocation methods involve an iterative process. Thus, it takes time for these methods to converge to a stable point where no WBANs change their channels any more. So how the proposed method minimized this time which is utilized by the iterative process of other methods. Further a comparative analysis in terms of this iterative process time can also be incorporated. 

6. Comparative analysis presented by the authors also not sufficient to show the novelty of the work. only a single method is utilized to show the comparative analysis. 

7. Conclusion also required presenting in more quantitative manner. 

8. How the proposed  channel allocation methods is more efficient than the other existing methods and on which parameters. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have made sufficient changes, against the comments and have justified the proposed method. However, there is still ambiguity in the result of Fig. 3, where the authors claim that the data rate is higher for the proposed scheme. For N=200, the RANS performs better than the KNN and proposed scheme, and authors have not clearly explained the reason for it, instead given an average improvement for the proposed method. 

The introduction section, where the authors cite multiple references, needs to be separated by commas.

Also, in the abstract, where the authors present their achieved result in terms of numbers may be changed to a more subtle mention in terms of "improved performance". The same performance is described in contributions, therefore, the abstract need not refer to exact numbers in the abstract.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors tried to incorporate most of the comments of the reviewer but still a major comment is not properly addressed. Reviewer want to mention that the response provided by the authors related to the comparative analysis of the proposed work, is not sufficient to present the novelty of the work. A more detailed analysis with existing technique must be incorporated in the revised version of the manuscript.  

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf