Survivability Analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network based on Dynamic Weighted Clustering Algorithm with Dual Cluster Heads

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this paper, the authors have proposed a UAV clustering algorithm with two cluster heads. Although the authors have performed a detailed analysis on the the proposed method, the results do not support the motivations and conclusions of this work. Below are some comments that can help improve the quality of this paper - 

1/ On Page 2, lines 42-47, the authors state their motivations of the work, as solving the problems of 'high mobility of UAVs' and ' limited energy of UAVs'. However, there is no performance evaluation in terms of the mobility of energy consumption of the UAVs. The state transition model is vague and probabilistic, and does not capture the relation of these state probabilities to actual mobility and energy consumption parameters.

2/ In the same paragraph, the authors state this as a drawback of current works in literature - "cluster members and cluster heads will inevitably change frequently, and frequent re-clustering will cause a waste of resources and affect the performance of the network, as well as waste the limited energy of the UAV." However, wouldn't the same issue arise in the proposed scheme? Frequent re-clustering or high mobility would cause the bCH to enter failure state repeatedly, and it would be a waste of resources to create a backup, if the backup is not available later. 

The state model does capture these issues. However, the performance evaluation did not capture the impact of frequent re-clustering and how the proposed scheme performs better than existing works. A robust performance comparison with state-of-the-art approaches is completely missing. Therefore, more analysis and performance results/comparison are required to justify the contributions of this work.

3/ Figure 9 is confusing. The abrupt changes (staggered plot) do not indicate stability. In fact, these bounces indicate instability. The authors need to explain this concept more appropriately, and also provide a performance comparison (on this metric) with previous papers in the field.

4/ Minor comment - The figures in the performance evaluation section are very small, and the plots cannot be seen clearly. The entries in the plots are barely visible. Please enlarge, and revise the paper for typographical and grammatical errors.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors proposed a Dynamic Weighted Clustering Algorithm with Dual Cluster Heads (DWCA-DCH) to deploy UAV networks. The selection of prime cluster head and backup cluster head was designed by synthetically considering communication quality and remaining energy of the UAV to tradeoff communication efficiency and lifetime. A Survivability Analysis Method based on Markov Process (SAM- MP) was constructed to analyze the survivability performance of a proposed UAV network based on DWCA-DCH when the UAV node suffered from energy exhaustion or accidents. There are some comments and questions about their work:

- Some readers will be curious why you choose a square of 1km*1km, and a constant flying height of 50m in the Simulation Section. I think you can list some applications of UAV networks in the Introduction Section, then the choice in the Simulation Section is suitable for real applications.

- Line 303-304: what is the root to set those values of weight coefficients? Are those values appropriate to presentation in lines 179-181?

- Showing Figures 5-8 in larger size.

- Add label and unit for Figure 4.

- The number of 38% was shown in the Abstract Section, however it is difficult to recognize this number in the Simulation Results Section. Please provide a Table of statistical summaries of those comparisons in the Simulation Results Section.

- The Conclusions Section is too simple, it should be improved.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

-The paper although interesting, is related to a topic that has already been thoroughly studied and investigated. The standardization of this class of protocols is already very advanced and at least some indications should be provided in the text before acceptance.

-The novelty and major contribution of the research need properly described. 

-There is no related work section, which is just summarized in the introduction. This could be ok for a short conference paper, but definitely not for a full-length journal version with no page limitation. The authors should provide a full section explaining the novelty of their approach. Therefore, I leave some suggestions for related work: -Exploiting the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to provide resilience in wireless sensor networks.

-Another point that is very lightly treated but that should require more input is on the issues and cost of implementing these types of solutions.

-I hope to read something about the practical application of the approach. A Section of applicability of the proposed solution is requerid in this manuscript.

-How is the issue of UAV mobility treated in the experiments? 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

the authors responded appropriately to the comments