Optimizing Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Binary Ant Colony Algorithm with Hill Climbing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you very much for your helpful comments on our paper!

The biggest changes that we made to the revised paper are making more detailed explanations of the simulation parameters and the experiments done. We also added more detailed descriptions to the figures as opposed to just simple titles. More detailed explanations were also made for the flowchart of the algorithm (Figure 6). In regards to the BACA algorithm, it was written with the initial assumption that sensors are randomly and densely deployed enough to cover the 2D field. Also, the process of creating a solution is described in phase 2 where the ants will pick the next sensor based on the pheromone and heuristic information. This process creates a binary string of 1's and 0's where 1 represents sensor activity and 0 represents inactivity. In regards to the Hill Climbing and Simulated Annealing Algorithms, slight changes were also made such as incorporating another pseudocode to represent the BACA-HC algorithm.

Hope this answers your great feedback!

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

My suggestion is to extended Reference of the manuscript with more contemporary literature from the relevant research field.

Author Response

We very much appreciate your helpful comments on our paper.

Some of the biggest changes that we made to the paper were incorporating more detailed explanations for the algorithms and results for the simulations. We hope that these changes will allow the readers to have a better understanding of the algorithms and see how HC is favored over the SA. 

Hope this answers your great feedback!

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. Fig 4,5,6 need to be better explained. Do provide descriptions of what the figures show rather than a plain title.

 

2. It is still unclear as to when hill climbing or simulated annealing should be chosen.

 

3. The TSP and ACO are established approaches. Authors should focus on the elaboration of proposed BACA, BACA-SA and BACA-HC methods and provide details on the conditions to select the SA and HC options.

 

4. The pseudo code provided should be for the BACA-SA and BACA-HC approach with all considerations added.

 

5. Provide more details on the experiment overview to allow the audience to have a better understanding of how the proposed methods are applied in actual industrial cases.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your helpful comments on our paper!   We decided to add better descriptions to many of the figures as opposed to just simple titles. Figure 6 was also edited and more thoroughly explained. We also added more detail to our simulations and results so that it will be more clear as to which algorithm was favored. The pseudocode for the BACA-HC was also added in addition to the BACA and BACA-SA. The biggest change made was having more detailed explanations for the simulation setup and results of the experiments. We hope that with these changes, the readers will have a better understanding of how the algorithms work and the differences between BACA-HC and BACA-SA.    Hope this answers your great feedback!

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper proposes an approach to combine BACA with HC or SA algorithms. The topic is interesting and relevant.

Despite the relevance of the subject, the authors inform in the abstract that the BACA algorithm is not an optimal solution and propose to adopt the algorithm with HC OR SA. This is the first time that I read a manuscript in which one solution OR another is recommended. This sounds strange to me and I recommend the authors to consider one or another algorithm to be employed with BACA.

The organization of the manuscript is not usual. For example, sections 2 and 3 can be merged in a single section (and also section 4). Some figures could be improved (figures 3, 4 and 6). I also believe that figure 1 could be suppressed from the manuscript.

The authors use few citations in the manuscript, which is not usual. The first citation appears only in page 3. Aditionally, the references are not enumerated according to its appearance on the text. The references also should be improved (there are few relevant references cited in the text).

The pseudo-algorithms for BACA and SA are presented; why not the same for HC algorithm?

Regarding to the simulation results and discussion, I'd recommend the authors to improve the description of the simulation parameters. An ordinary reader would consider complicated to replicate the simulation if based on the description provided in the manuscript.

Do the authors consider that 100 repetitions are enough to have a strong statistical confidence?

The results in section 7 could be better explained. The analysis of the results is very simplified.

Author Response

We very much appreciate the helpful comments you made on our paper!

We ended up changing the title to where only Hill Climbing was mentioned with the BACA algorithm since it was the favored algorithm. Another change that we made was adding more detailed descriptions for the figures rather than just simple titles. Some of the figures such as Figure 6 were also more thoroughly explained in the paper. The pseudocode for the BACA-HC algorithm was also added. As for the simulations and the results, we made better explanations for the simulation setup and results so that the readers can have a better understanding of how BACA-HC was favored over BACA-SA.

Hope this answers your great feedback!

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 The manuscript’s results are now reproducible.

The algorithms used in manuscript are now described with sufficient details .

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the revisions made.

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I congratulate the authors for the efforts to improve the original version submitted some weeks ago. I believe that the issues adressed by the authors are ok and all the comments provided are appropriate.

My only comment is that the new version was submitted in a template which is different from the traditional MDPI template. Please observe that.

I do not have further comments or requests as my previous requests were attended by the authors in the revised version.