Event Estimation Accuracy of Social Sensing with Facebook for Social Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

© 2014 IEEE. Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) is a new paradigm that enables social relationships among vehicles via the Internet. People in the vehicles using online social networks (OSNs) can be an integral part of SIoV that enables the collection of data for sensing a physical phenomenon, i.e., social sensing. In this paper, we study the main social sensing mechanism in Facebook, comment thread network (CTN), which is based on the interactions of users through user walls in Facebook for SIoV. After seeing their commuters' contents about an event, users either add comments or like these posts, and Facebook CTN emerges as a social sensing medium in estimation of an event through social consensus. For the first time, this paper investigates the social sensing capability of Facebook CTN, i.e., the accuracy of collective observations for SIoV. The accuracy depends on the user characteristics and the features of the OSN, since perceptions of the users and how they use Facebook may manipulate their observation signals. We analyze the reliability of Facebook CTN for varying user behaviors, user relationships, Facebook features, and network size. The results indicate that the polarized weighting of the observations and the use of less reliable post types in CTN deteriorate the accuracy of the estimate signal, i.e., social consensus. Furthermore, the selection of users is likely to be an important factor in social sensing.