DND: Driver Node Detection for Control Message Diffusion in Smart Transportations

Along with the development of IoT and mobile edge computing in recent years, smart transportation holds great potential to improve road safety and efficiency. The network that carries smart transportation service is highly dynamic. Controllability has long been recognized as one of the fundamental properties of such temporal networks, which can provide valuable insights for the construction of new infrastructures, and thus is in urgent need to be explored. In this article, under the smart transportation scenario, we first disclose the controllability problem in Internet of Vehicles (IoV), and then design DND (Driver Node Detection) algorithm based on Kalman's controllability rank condition to analyze the controllability and control message diffusion in such a dynamic temporal network. Moreover, we use the control message diffusion efficiency as a metric to assist in selecting suitable driver nodes. At last, we conduct a series of experiments to analyze the controllability of the IoV network, and the results show the effects of vehicle density, speed, coverage radius on network controllability, and the efficiency of the control message diffusion algorithm and its feedback effect on driver nodes selection. These insights are critical for varieties of applications in the future smart transportation.