  A dynamical system is controllable if by imposing appropriate external
signals on a subset of its nodes, it can be driven from any initial state to
any desired state in finite time. Here we study the impact of various network
characteristics on the minimal number of driver nodes required to control a
network. We find that clustering and modularity have no discernible impact, but
the symmetries of the underlying matching problem can produce linear, quadratic
or no dependence on degree correlation coefficients, depending on the nature of
the underlying correlations. The results are supported by numerical simulations
and help narrow the observed gap between the predicted and the observed number
of driver nodes in real networks.
