Prioritized Shortest Path Computation Mechanism (PSPCM) for wireless sensor networks

Innocent Uzougbo Onwuegbuzie; Shukor Abd Razak; Ismail Fauzi Isnin; Arafat Al-dhaqm; Nor Badrul Anuar

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264683

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 3, 2020
17 Feb 2021 Decision Letter - Muhammad Asif, Editor PONE-D-20-34672 Prioritized Shortest Path Computation Mechanism (PSPCM) for Wireless Sensor Networks PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Al-dhaqm, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 03 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Muhammad Asif, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: "This research was supported and funded by the University Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) with grant no. Q.J130000.2513.20H60." 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Therefore, Please revise the article in light of the reviewers comments and resubmit. Thank you [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 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 ****** 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 ****** 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: This paper is about energy efficient routing of data in Wireless Sensor Networks. A problem well studied is moving sensed data to sink nodes. As the nodes have limited battery power, energy conserving routing of data is important. In the context of IoT a standard shortest path routing has been defined. The authors claim that priority of data should be considered in finding paths and develop a priority data based algorithm. They use a smart home as an application to demonstrate their approach. Essentially, they consider data to have either high priority or low priority. Routing is accomplished by setting up weighted graph and applying Dijkstra's shortest weighted path algorithm. The paper describes the problem, discusses background and related work, present their approach, and then show simulation results compared to schemes that doesn't use priorities for data. As can be expected, by prioritizing they can improve performance of one class over another. They show results on delivery completion for high priority versus low priority data. They also compare the performance of PSPCM with other related algorithms and show improvements. Overall, the results seem to be interesting and useful. However, a more impactful work would be to understand the type of data and to see if some form of reduction in actual data bits sent, while maintaining full functionality, would conserve more energy. The paper is well organized, however, careful reading is needed to ensure all English type errors are corrected. Reviewer #2: This manuscript proposes a prioritized shortest path computation mechanism (PSPCM) by introducing high priority data (HPD) and Low priority data (LPD) metric (value of 0 or 1) within the data package (DIO message object). Their results show improved performance (Packet delivery rate and power consumption) compared to other techniques (ETX, QCOF, QWL-RPL, RPL-EC, RPL-FL). Comments: 1) Results for Throughput (Sec. 5.1.3; Fig. 11) only shows performance within proposed PSPCM (i.e. HPD vs LPD). These must also be compared with other techniques (i.e. ETX, QCOF, QWL-RPL, RPL-EC, RPL-FL) without priority to show that the proposed technique is superior or similar in performance. 2) The proposed scheme uses binary values of HPD and LPD. It is not clear what criteria will be used by the source to decide on this binary decision. Greedy sources might set all their packages to HPD, as there is no objective measure or criteria, which will result in loss of advantages of the proposed scheme. 3) If the packet delivery ratio for LPD is very low for 100 nodes (Fig. 9), what will happen to the Fig. 13 if the number of nodes is increased to 100? The same argument does for Fig. 10, 11, 12 also. Thus, for Sec. 12, all simulation needs to be updated to at least 100 nodes. As most practical network is much larger to this, it begs the question of the number of nodes is very large, then will the proposed PSPCM will lose its advantage? 4) As LPD packages will be less prioritized, then there is an issue of inability to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for these packages. How this can be resolved? 5) 5G wireless network system, which is upcoming, resolves a lot of existing issues with high priority data and latency. The authors need to compare their results with 5G protocols. ****** 6. 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Revision 1
2 Apr 2021 Author Response Innocent Uzougbo ONWUEGBUZIE School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia 31th March 2021. The Editor, PLoS ONE Dear Editor, Rebuttal Letter Thank you for inviting us to submit a revised draft of our manuscript entitled, "Prioritized shortest path computation mechanism (PSPCM) for wireless sensor networks" for consideration by PLoS ONE. We also appreciate the time and effort you and each of the reviewers have dedicated to providing insightful feedback on ways to strengthen our paper. Thus, it is with great pleasure that we resubmit our revised paper for further consideration. We have incorporated changes that reflect the detailed suggestions you have meticulously provided. We also hope that our updates/improvements and the responses we provide below satisfactorily address all the issues and concerns you and the reviewers have raised. For clarity, we have presented our responses to your comments and questions in a Section format; Section 1: Editors' comment and response, Section 2: Response to the evaluation by Reviewer 1, and Section 3: Response to the evaluation by Reviewer 2. Section 1: Editors' comment and response Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. Response: Thank you for your comments. The paper has been formatted to meet PLOS ONE’s style requirements. Section 2: Response to the evaluation by Reviewer 1 1. Overall, the results seem to be interesting and useful. However, a more impactful work would be to understand the type of data and to see if some form of reduction in actual data bits sent, while maintaining full functionality, would conserve more energy. Response: Thank you so much for your insightful comments and suggestions to improve the quality of our work. The type of data traversed across the network is in bits and bytes (8 bits equals a byte). By standard, the IEEE 802.15.4 allows for a maximum transmission unit (MTU) of 127 bytes; 25 bytes for MAC Frame Header, and 102 bytes for payload. However, of the 102 bytes for payload, 21 bytes are used for link-layer security, 40 bytes for IPv6 header, and 8 bytes for UDP header. Eventually, the payload is left with only 33 bytes. Depending on the size of data sensed from the monitored environment, the 33 bytes may not be enough. To increase the payload size, the techniques of Header Compression (HC) were used to compress the IPv6 header and UDP header from 48 bytes to 6 bytes. This eventually increased the payload capacity to 75 bytes. For this research, a payload size of 40 bytes was used. This was sufficient enough to ensure the optimal performance of the proposed PSPCM with conserved energy utilization. Further details of this are presented in the third and fourth paragraphs of Section 3.1. The entire simulation/experimentation was reperformed with the updated parameters. To also show support for PSPCM network scalability, the number of nodes for HPD and LPD comparison was increased from 100 to 300, while the number of nodes for comparison with related mechanisms (i.e. ETX, QCOF, QWL-RPL, RPL-EC, RPL-FL), was increased from 50 to 200. The new findings are discussed in Sections 5.1 and 5.2 2. The paper is well organized; however, careful reading is needed to ensure all English-type errors are corrected. Response: Thank you for your comments. The entire paper has been proofread, and all grammatical and spelling errors have been corrected. Section 2: Response to the evaluation by Reviewer 2. 1. Results for Throughput (Sec. 5.1.3; Fig. 11) only shows performance within the proposed PSPCM (i.e. HPD vs LPD). These must also be compared with other techniques (i.e. ETX, QCOF, QWL-RPL, RPL-EC, RPL-FL) without priority to show that the proposed technique is superior or similar in performance. Response: Thank you very much for your comments. The Throughput performance of PSPCM in comparison with related mechanisms (i.e. ETX, QCOF, QWL-RPL, RPL-EC, RPL-FL) is now presented and supported with updated discussion in Section 5.2.3. The result shows that PSPCM outperformed compared mechanisms. 2. The proposed scheme uses binary values of HPD and LPD. It is not clear what criteria will be used by the source to decide on this binary decision. Greedy sources might set all their packages to HPD, as there is no objective measure or criteria, which will result in a loss of advantages of the proposed scheme. Response: Thank you for your comments. The deciding factor is the Class of Service (CS) tag of the data, which is pre-configured into the sensor nodes (High Priority Node – HPN and Low Priority Node – LPN) before network operations begin. See Fig. 4. The 8-bits Reserved field of the DIO base object which runs in the network layer of the WSN protocol stack of all nodes is modified to accommodate data of varying priorities and this is represented by the CS tags, where bits 00000000 is for CS = 0 representing Low Priority Data (LPD) and bits 00000001 is for CS = 1 representing High Priority Data (HPD). See Fig. 7. In order words, HPN is pre-configured with CS = 1, and LPN are pre-configured with CS = 0 before the commencement of network operations. In this way, it becomes impossible for any of the node types to behave greedily in favor of its class of data. As either of the data class traverses the network, intermediate or relay nodes computes the shortest traversal distance between source and destination node. Further details are presented in Sections 3.1 and 3.1.1. 3. If the packet delivery ratio for LPD is very low for 100 nodes (Fig. 9), what will happen to Fig. 13 if the number of nodes is increased to 100? The same argument does for Fig. 10, 11, 12 also. Thus, for Sec. 12, all simulation needs to be updated to at least 100 nodes. As the most practical network is much larger than this, it begs the question of the number of nodes is very large, then will the proposed PSPCM will lose its advantage? Response: Thank you for your comments and question. The number of nodes has been increased from 50 to 200 for comparison with related mechanisms (i.e. ETX, QCOF, QWL-RPL, RPL-EC, RPL-FL) and the simulations/experimentations was reperformed, results was used to plot the graphs - Figs 16, 17, 18 and 19 for PDR, Power consumption, Throughput, and Convergence time respectively. The findings is supported by discussion in Section 5.2. Subsequently, to show support for network scalability of the proposed mechanism – PSPCM, and its HPD and LPD comparison, the number of simulated nodes was increased from 100 to 300, and the simulations/experimentations were reperformed. The obtained results were used to plot the graphs – Figs 12, 13, 14, and 15, for PDR, Power consumption, Throughput, and Convergence time respectively. A detailed discussion of the findings and is presented in Section 5.1. 4. As LPD packages will be less prioritized, then there is an issue of inability to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for these packages. How this can be resolved? Response: Thank you for your comments and question. A much clearer explanation as to how PSPCM works have been presented in Section 3.1.6. The applications of the mechanism have also been presented in Figs. 3 and 4 (updated/improved) of Section 3.1. In this Figure, it is shown that High Priority Nodes (HPN), which generates HPD are installed in locations whose data are deemed critical, time-sensitive, and of high priority, likewise, Low Priority Nodes (LPN) which generates LPD are installed in locations whose data are less critical delay-tolerant and low priority. HPN and LPN are preconfigured and assigned a Class of Service (CS) of 1 and 0 respectively. This is implemented in the Reserved field of the modified DIO Base Object as presented in Fig 7 (updated) with explanations provided in Sections 3.1.1, while Section 3.1.6 presents the details of how the proposed PSPCM works. With this approach, data emanating from either HPN or LPN are routed to the sink using Eqs 14 and 16 for HPD or Eqs 15 and 17 for LPD. This approach helps to check and prevent any data from acting greedily to the detriment of the other data class, thereby preserving and improving the Quality of Service (QoS). 5. 5G wireless network system, which is upcoming, resolves a lot of existing issues with high priority data and latency. The authors need to compare their results with 5G protocols. Response: Thank you very much for your comments. While 5G is gradually gaining the center-stage particularly for high-speed internet, with very minimal latency, at the moment, it will not completely wipe-out the existing technologies like 4G and WSN. One major drawback of 5G is the high cost of implementation and high power/energy consumption, which currently does not seem good for low-power and lossy network (LLN) devices. On the other hand, LLN devices have the advantage of very low power consumption making it possible for them to be installed in just any location and left unattended for several months or years without battery replacement. To make the best of both technologies, 5G and WSN can be implemented in conjunction together in a multi-tiered network, where the lower-tier is for WSN (data generation and aggregation) and the upper-tier is for transporting the aggregated data by high-speed 5G network for either immediate processing and or storage. This is what we implemented in our approach. Further detail of this is presented in Fig. 3, and Section 3.1. Again, thank you for giving us the opportunity to strengthen our manuscript with your valuable comments and queries. We have worked hard to incorporate your feedback and hope that these revisions persuade you to accept our submission. Sincerely yours, Innocent Uzougbo ONWUEGBUZIE (Corresponding Author) Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) +601160770749 Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Responses to Reviewers - Rebuttal Letter.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264683.r002
9 Jun 2021 Decision Letter - Chakchai So-In, Editor PONE-D-20-34672R1 Prioritized Shortest Path Computation Mechanism (PSPCM) for Wireless Sensor Networks PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Onwuegbuzie, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 23 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Chakchai So-In, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 #2: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed ******** 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 #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Partly ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: N/A Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes Reviewer #3: No ****** 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 #2: The revised manuscript has addressed my past concerns. I have no further comments for this manuscript. Reviewer #3: The problems which were proposed in the last version were carefully checked and revised, however, some fetal problems exist. 1. The organization of the manuscript should be improved to highlight the objective, method, and main contribution. 2. The author is expected to demonstrate the main advantage of the current method. 3. Part 2 is to be improved, and it could be more concise. ****** 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 #2: No Reviewer #3: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264683.r003
Revision 2
2 Aug 2021 Author Response Reviewers’ Comments Responses 1. The manuscript should be written in standard English, all grammar and typographical errors should be corrected Thank you so much for your comments. All grammatical and typographical errors in the article has been corrected. 2. The organization of the manuscript should be improved to highlight the objective, method, and main contribution Thank you for your comments. The organization of the article has been improved to highlight the objective, method and main contribution. This is presented in the 6th paragraph of Section 1: Introduction. 3. The author is expected to demonstrate the main advantage of the current method. Thank you for your comments. The main advantage of the proposed mechanism is in its ability to take into consideration the heterogenous data nature of WSN, classifying them and generating efficient and optimal shortest routing paths leading to the destination node (sink) while ensuring that the integrity of the network is not compromised. This detail is presented in paragraph six (6) of Section 1: Introduction, and Section 6 of Conclusion and future work 4. Part 2 is to be improved, and it could be more concise. Thank you for your comments. Part 2 of the article has been improved with the review of recent literatures in a concise manner. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Responses to Reviewers - Rebuttal Letter - Latest Version.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264683.r004
18 Oct 2021 Decision Letter - Chakchai So-In, Editor PONE-D-20-34672R2Prioritized Shortest Path Computation Mechanism (PSPCM) for Wireless Sensor NetworksPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Onwuegbuzie, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Kindly take a look at the comment with minor decision as follows: Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 02 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Chakchai So-In, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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 #3: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #4: (No Response) ******** 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 #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: (No Response) ****** 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 #3: Yes Reviewer #4: (No Response) ****** 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 #3: Yes Reviewer #4: (No Response) ******** 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 #3: The problems I have proposed in the last version were carefully checked and revised, the quality of the paper seems fine. I recommend its publication. Reviewer #4: This paper studied the "Prioritized shortest path computation mechanism (PSPCM) for wireless sensor networks ". The quality should be improved. Minor revision should be done for this version of the paper as follows: More achievements on this topic should be added for the Section "introductions" and "Related work" . Mathematics modeling to analyze the method is not enough. * Some references are out-of-date, so these references before 2014 should be deleted. At the same time, many important recent references are missing, which can support the idea of this paper, the following references should be added in the Section "References": 1- "Multipath routing through the firefly algorithm and fuzzy logic in wireless sensor networks". Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 14(2), 541-558. 2- "An energy-aware clustering and two-level routing method in wireless sensor networks". Computing, 102(7), 1653-1671. 3- "A hierarchical secure data aggregation method using the dragonfly algorithm in wireless sensor networks". Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 1-26. 4- "A reliable tree-based data aggregation method in wireless sensor networks". Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 14(2), 873-887. 5- "SHSDA: secure hybrid structure data aggregation method in wireless sensor networks". Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1-20. 6- "EELRP: energy efficient layered routing protocol in wireless sensor networks". Computing, 1-21. 7- "A method for routing and data aggregating in cluster‐based wireless sensor networks". International Journal of Communication Systems, 34(7), e4754. The writing format of the paper should be revised. The format of some references in this paper does not completed. ******** 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 #3: Yes:** Haochun Zhang Reviewer #4: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264683.r005
Revision 3
10 Dec 2021 Author Response Responses to comments by Reviewer 4 1. More achievements on this topic should be added for the Section "introductions" and "Related work" Thank you for your comments and suggestions. More achievements have been added to the “Introduction” and “Related work” sections, and their references have been included in the References section. 2. Mathematics modeling to analyze the method is not enough. Thank you for your comments. The mathematics modeling to analyze the proposed mechanism has been improved and presented in a more detailed manner. This is shown in Section 3.1.5 3. Some references are out-of-date, so these references before 2014 should be deleted. At the same time, many important recent references are missing, which can support the idea of this paper, the following references should be added in the Section "References" Thank you for your comments and suggestions. All out-of-date references before 2014 have been removed and updated with up-to-date references as suggested. Please refer to the References section. 4. The writing format of the paper should be revised. Thank you for your comments and suggestions. The writing format of this paper has been revised as suggested. 5. The format of some references in this paper does not completed. Thank you for your comments. References with incomplete format have been completely removed and updated with properly formatted and up-to-date references. Kindly refer to the References section. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Responses to Reviewers - Rebuttal Letter - Noveber Version.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264683.r006
16 Feb 2022 Decision Letter - Chakchai So-In, Editor Prioritized Shortest Path Computation Mechanism (PSPCM) for Wireless Sensor Networks PONE-D-20-34672R3 Dear Dr. Onwuegbuzie, 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. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Chakchai So-In, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Thank you for submitting the paper for PLOS ONE and further follow the the process toward publication process. C.S. 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 #4: All comments have been addressed ******** 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 #4: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #4: 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 #4: No ****** 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 #4: 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 #4: Necessary corrections have been made in the article and the authors have answered reviewer's comments. Now, the quality of the paper is suitable. ****** 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 #4: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264683.r007
Formally Accepted
22 Feb 2022 Acceptance Letter - Chakchai So-In, Editor PONE-D-20-34672R3 Prioritized shortest path computation mechanism (PSPCM) for wireless sensor networks Dear Dr. Onwuegbuzie: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Chakchai So-In Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264683.r008

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