The DEWI High-Level Architecture: Wireless Sensor Networks in Industrial Applications

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a state of the art paper created by people from different countries. Three examples respectively dealing with a flying rocket, an airplane, and a truck help readers understand what authors intend to propose. Besides, this manuscript defines a high-level architecture of dependable embedded wireless infrastructure. It is interesting to modern information technology society. Compared with the literature, this manuscript uses a multi-perspective approach to various aspects and attributes of the dependable embedded wireless infrastructure. The manuscript is well written. The text is clear with helpful graphs. The conclusions are consistent with the evidence and arguments presented.

The full name of BER in Table 1 should be spelled. WSN that appears many times in the manuscript should be spelled too.

Author Response

Thanks to the reviewer for the comments. 

The full name of BER in Table 1 should be spelled (Done)

WSN that appears many times in the manuscript should be spelled too.

(WSN has now been spelled the first time it appears)

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper can be classified as long survey that reviews the DEWI High-Level Architecture in WSN. The paper is well written and organized. However, I have some minor comments to improve it:

• The authors need to justify the motivation behind this work? why this survey outperforms or overcome the existing surveys?
• The authors need to add a dissection section where they discuss the different issues/limitation and challenges to face.
• They can also cover some future directions of their work and on what it can help the research community in the future?
• The paper is an extension of a conference paper published by the ICDIM conference in 2016. The authors need to clarify what is the new contribution in this paper compared to the published paper? and as after 4 years they decided to extend the paper, so they need to highlight its added value.
• References need to be updated. In a research paper, website links and grants are not included. Only research peer review published papers are cited as references (journal and conference papers)
• Too many figures and tables with no references. Are these figures are proposed by the authors? I do not think so. 

Author Response

Thanks a lot for your comments:

This paper can be classified as long survey that reviews the DEWI High-Level Architecture in WSN. The paper is well written and organized. However, I have some minor comments to improve it:

• The authors need to justify the motivation behind this work? why this survey outperforms or overcome the existing surveys?

The paper has been modified to include the motivations. The paper is not only a long survey. We propose a methodology to create dependable wireless sensor and actuator networks using the concept of the Bubble. The bubble allows us to encapsulate sensor technologies with a single protocol to provide interoperability. The Bubble has three internal levels that reflect the infrastructure in industrial use cases. Unlike other architectures, we include the critical infrastructure of existing industrial use cases (Level 1), and we provide guidelines on how to match the wireless sensor networks and this existing infrastructure (e.g. ,The internal network of an aircraft or the internal network of a car or a spaceship). In other words, we review the state of the art of each level of the proposed architecture to allow designers to increase dependability of commercial sensor networks to be able to use it in critical industrial use cases. This is not addressed in any existing architecture.

• The authors need to add a dissection section where they discuss the different issues/limitation and challenges to face.

This is included in the introduction section, which has now been modified to reflect this requirmenty.

• They can also cover some future directions of their work and on what it can help the research community in the future?

The section of conclusions already includes future issues. We have extended this future issues.

• The paper is an extension of a conference paper published by the ICDIM conference in 2016. The authors need to clarify what is the new contribution in this paper compared to the published paper? and as after 4 years they decided to extend the paper, so they need to highlight its added value.

The original paper conference onloy proposed the architecture. This extended journal version includes more details of the state of the art, it also includes the conclusions o fthe implenetation in all the use cases of the project.

• References need to be updated. In a research paper, website links and grants are not included. Only research peer review published papers are cited as references (journal and conference papers)

We need reference to websites because they include the definition of the differnet protocols of the architecture.

• Too many figures and tables with no references. Are these figures are proposed by the authors? I do not think so. 

All figures and tables (except Table 1) were proposed by the authors. They are now all referenced in the paper.