An opportunistic network approach towards disease spreading

Abstract

Research in modeling epidemic spreading in static networks has reached maturity in recent years. On the contrary, disease spreading in dynamic networks can be considered as an important open issue. Hence, mapping dynamic interactions of crowds to a static network and then immunizing the resulting network is the subject of this paper. In this work, we analogize spreading of diseases in dynamic networks -based on dynamic interactions- to message delivery in opportunistic networks. Thus, different diseases which have different spreading behaviors could be simulated by specific routing protocols. Having used interactions among individuals in the utilized dataset, the resulting network is immunized by vaccinating most central nodes. Our results show that in case of seasonal disease, optimal DTN (Delay Tolerant Network) solution is Epidemic routing to detect influential persons and in case of infectious disease, Direct Delivery routing is an optimal solution.