IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology投稿经验分享-1

   总述：目前团队主要研究5G、6G无线通信物理层安全问题，传统物理层安全指标基于信息论假设（即假设数据包编码长度无限大），难以度量uRLLC（ultra-reliable and low latency communication）场景物理层安全方案的可靠性和安全性。因此，针对uRLLC物理层安全方案度量性能标准，基于有限编码长度约束，提出有效的安全度量指标并进一步考虑协作通信和用户移动性对uRLLC物理层安全的影响，于2022年12月中旬提交至IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology。重点和大家分享文章经历的审稿过程，包括时间节点划分和审稿状态变更过程，分析审稿人提出的宝贵意见等。

1 时间节点划分和审稿状态变更过程

   文章于2022-12-12提交，2021-4-12反馈结果（reject and resubmit），2021-8-8提交反馈意见，2021-10-14反馈结果（accepted with minor revisions as a paper），2021-11-12提交反馈意见，2022-1-27反馈结果（accepted as a paper)。

   从审稿状态变更过程来看，文章经历了如下五个过程：Awaiting Admin Processing->under review->reject and resubmit->minor revision->accepted，而reject and resubmit算是比较严重了，这里解释一下，① IEEE TVT初审好的情况一般包括accepted（没有遇到过），minor revision（没有遇到过），reconsider, major revision（等同于major revision，下一期讲这一篇的投稿经验分享），② 不同于有些Trans期刊，在IEEE TVT期刊里under review和under Review没有区别（即IEEE TVT就我所知只有under review）。接下来，主要从审稿意见分析及反馈角度讨论如何挽救这篇文章。

2 审稿意见分析

   在IEEE TVT投稿过程中，我经历的一般是三位审稿人，但这篇文章是两位审稿人。

2.1 审稿意见Reviewer 1

This paper studies the PLS design in URLLC scenarios and proposes suitable performance metrics for evaluating the PLS of URLLC. This paper then identifies the key challenging issues for achieving PLS in the context of URLLC and discusses the role of cooperative communication and mobility. However, this paper seems not yet complete and looks like a technical report, not a technical article.

1. The presentation of this paper is a disaster, and this paper seems not yet complete. This paper lacks a section for simulation settings and results. There are many typos and grammar errors. The organization also needs to be improved. Some abbreviations (e.g., COP and SOP) are not explained and described. The main contributions are also not described in the introduction. What are the main contributions of this paper?
2. This paper only proposes performance metrics and discusses challenging issues. This paper uses more than four pages reviewing the current popular performance metrics for the PLS. The challenging issues and solutions are only described in about three pages of this paper. This paper looks like a technical report, not a technical article. The contributions are not sufficient for publishing in TVT.
3. The related works of this paper are not compressively surveyed. This paper only cites self-papers [7] and [8]. However, the two papers have not been published and are not suitable as references. This paper should discuss other works studying the PLS of URLLC in the introduction. Although this paper summarizes the performance metrics for URLLC in Table I, this paper should cite them.
4. Many figures are blurred and small (e.g., Fig. 1, 3, 4, 6, and 9).

2.2 Reviewer 1审稿意见分析

 个人感觉however这个词还是蛮严重的，所以在写文章或者给别人审稿时，如果没有特别差的情况我是不会用这个词。针对这篇文章而言，审稿人既然用了however，说明问题还是非常大的，主要包括①审稿人认为这并不是一篇research article更像是report，换句话说，文章单纯描述了保证uRLLC物理层安全的重要性和挑战性问题，讨论了协作通信和移动性的优势（后来我想了想，协作通信和移动性大程度上有利于实现物理层安全，还用我写文章说了，这不是多此一举~~~）；②主要贡献描述不清晰，没有仿真实验，逻辑结构混乱，语法错误明显等。这一点近1年我深有体会，自己写完的文章建议拿给同行看看，尤其是abstract，contributions和network model（这个很重要，有两篇文章就是审稿人提出问题较多的就是关于network model描述的），我研究生写的文章在contributions也是存在很多问题，一般把握住两点就可以了，一是阐述结论，而是揭示结论背后隐含的意义（将来会单独拿出一期来讲《高水平论文写作及发表-逻辑思维能力的养成》，目前给学院研究生讲过了）。③针对uRLLC物理层安全研究，给出的基础工作是自己的且未发表的，支撑力不够。

   总体来看，第一个审稿人给出的结论还是蛮严重的，逻辑混乱，本文研究的前期基础支撑力不够，没有仿真实验。

2.3 Reviewer 2审稿意见分析

This paper targets ultra-reliable low-latency communication (uRLLC) service and discuss the existing tradeoff between the low latency and reliability, with an additional security viewpoint. Based on the state-of-the-art technology of physical layer security (PLC), the authors exploit the wireless channel's randomness characteristics to fulfill the security and confidentiality of transmitted information. To meet the service requirements of uRLLC, the authors proposed to apply suitable performance metrics with the limited block-length constraint. Two solution concepts are proposed to show some preliminary results of adopting cooperative relaying and leveraging mobility.
However, the reviewer considers some insufficiencies as follows:

1. This paper's title initially shows cooperative communication and mobility key terms to address security, reliability, and low latency. But the manuscript uses lots of space to describe the naïve tradeoff between reliability and low-latency. Although the authors claimed that the security issue should address with the PLC technique, it seems that the idea of applying PLC into uRLLC by using location-based cooperative communication and mobility concept is just a rough concept without theoretical analyses or comprehensive experiments supports. The proposed solutions required too many assumptions and further information to achieve the uRLLC service, the technical depths of this paper seem insufficient.
2. This paper didn't include the related work sections and merely showed a table without further explicit descriptions. Why could those researches not apply to the uRLLC service, and what are the pros and cons of existing studies about the performance metrics? What are the state-of-the-art researches dealing with reliability, low-latency, and security? It seemed that there already existed some well-known studies address PLC, reliability, and low-latency jointly, but they didn't be mentioned in this paper [1][2]. The authors should carefully analyze and differentiate the proposed metrics with them to show the novelty. Still, the proposed mechanisms should compare with the latest solutions [1][2] to confirm their feasibility and performance. Since this paper lacks technical depths, proper experiments, and novel design solutions, there is still room for improvement.
3. The organization and grammar issues exist; this paper needs a better reconstruction and balances background descriptions and technical materials.
4. The resolution of diagrams is low and should redraw as a better version.
   References:
   [1] R. Chen, C. Li, S. Yan, R. Malaney and J. Yuan, "Physical Layer Security for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications," in IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 6-11, Oct. 2019.
   [2] J.D.V. Sánchez, L. Urquiza-Aguiar, M.C.P. Paredes, et al., "Survey on Physical Layer Security for 5G Wireless Networks," in Annals of Telecommunnications, 2020.

2.4 Reviewer 2审稿意见分析

   相比于第一位审稿人，这位审稿人给出的问题更为具体，主要包括①协作通信和移动性仅仅描述了概念，没有实质性结论和仿真实验强调可行性。②没有相关工作，体现不出来本文的价值在哪里。③逻辑结构混乱和语法错误。

3 总结

   两位审稿人给出的意见非常中肯，也一针见血的指出问题所在。其中第二位审稿人给出的意见个人感觉给major revision或者reject and resubmit合理，直接reject也行，按照第一位审稿人的意见，直接给reject较为合理。最后给了reject and resubmit个人认为理由有三点：第一，AE应该是小同行，uRLLC物理层安全度量指标中基于有限编码长度的COP，SOP和STC确实没有，从一定程度上肯定了作者的工作；第二，如果把仿真实验和相关补充完整，整体逻辑结构改一下，检查语法错误，这篇文章还是可以的。结果，我用了将近四个月的时间重新梳理了这篇文章，前后对比来看，基本上算是重写了~~~。

   为了更好地理解审稿人对所修改内容的看法，两次审稿意见，论文初稿及终稿已添加至附件，可以自行下载浏览，欢迎各位批评指正、讨论交流！