PONE-D-21-04508

Heterogeneous Networks: Fair Power Utilization in LTE-A Uplink scenarios

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. KURDA,

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Anandakumar Haldorai, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors study the problem off interference mitigation within long term evolution networks by providing initially a review analysis of the existing works that studied the impact of power control techniques in the interference mitigation regarding the network performance, and then the authors introduce an interference mitigation model in order to improve the operation of the LTE networks focusing on the uplink communication.

The authors have provided a detailed review of some existing methods studying the power control problem in the uplink of LTE networks and they have tried to categorize those approaches. Then, they introduce a femtocell-based architecture where they deal with a power control problem aiming at the interference mitigation.

They have introduced an algorithmic approach in order to deal with the power control problem and they examined several topologies in order to evaluate the proposed framework in terms of achievable throughput and the corresponding signal to interference plus noise ratio. The authors should consider the following suggestions provided by the reviewer in order to improve the quality of presentation of their manuscript, as well as its scientific depth.

Initially, in Section 2, the authors should discuss the existing resource management approaches, such as Tsiropoulou, E. E., et al. "Uplink resource allocation in SC-FDMA wireless networks: A survey and taxonomy." Computer Networks 96 (2016): 1-28, exploiting the single carrier frequency division multiple access technique in long-term evolution networks in order to deal with the problem of interference mitigation and power control.

Furthermore, the problem of power control and interference mitigation is jointly examined with the problem of bandwidth allocation, such as Tsiropoulou, E. E., et al. "Energy-efficient subcarrier allocation in SC-FDMA wireless networks based on multilateral model of bargaining." 2013 IFIP Networking Conference. IEEE, 2013, Hyung G. Myung, Junsung Lim, David J. Goodman, “Single carrier FDMA for uplink wireless transmission,”IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, Vol. 1, Issue 3, pp. 30 – 38, Feb. 2007, in order to provide realistic and holistic solutions that exploit the available resources of the network . The authors should improve the provided survey study in Section 2 in order to identify the existing approaches and better clarify their main contributions.

In Section 3, the authors seem to adopt a code division multiple access technique, which is relatively outdated in long term evolution networks. The authors should better clarify the choice of multiple access technique in order to perform their analysis.

In section 6, the authors should include some additional numerical results for a large scale set up with a large number of connected nodes in order to show the scalability, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed framework. This discussion should be complemented with some additional numerical simulations quantifying the computational complexity of the proposed framework. Finally, the overall manuscript should be checked for typos, syntax, and grammar errors in order to improve the quality of its presentation.

Reviewer #2: Comments:

In general, authors perform a detailed analysis on the targeted topic. The work looks solid. However, I have some comments that authors may concern:

1) the paper is entitled by "Heterogeneous Networks: Fair Power Utilization in LTE-A Uplink scenarios". however, in your manuscript, power utilization is not mentioned insufficiently. For example, in fig 2, only section mentions general power problems.

2) I suggest authors may further provide the concepts of Generation Partnership Project. In my opinion, traditional multi-layer networks cannot be regarded as Uplink (UL) direction. Authors should clarify these concepts.

3) authors may further mention the heterogeneous networks, such as done in zhang, et al. Nature-Inspired Self-Organization, Control, and Optimization in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks, ieee tmc, 2012. Authors may also investigate other types of such networks.

4) Tabulate the major findings from your previous analysis. There is no proper explanation under section 2.

5) Author may clear the contributions with case study approach.

6) Results must be properly discussed under the discussion section. There is no result comparison or analysis identified in this paper.

7) Add some new research and avoid repeated concepts in your manuscript.

Technical comments

1. The study presents the results of original research.

Yes satisfied

2. Results reported have not been published elsewhere.

Yes verified and recommended

3. Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.

The above section need some major revision, details addressed in author section

4. Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.

Satisfied

5. The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and is written in standard English.

The complete proofread recommended with native correction

6. The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.

Maybe improved

7. The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

Yes. Available

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Heterogeneous Networks: Fair Power Allocation in LTE-A Uplink Scenarios

PONE-D-21-04508R1

Dear Dr. KURDA,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Anandakumar Haldorai, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The authors have addressed all the issues raised.

Recommended for further publication process.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have addressed all the reviewers comments. The quality of presentation and the scientific depth of the manuscript have been substantially improved.

Reviewer #2: The paper discussed about Fair Power Utilization in Small Cell Uplink Scenarios in Heterogeneous Networks

The revised version of paper has improved.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No