Optimal control strategy for traffic driven epidemic spreading based on community structure

Abstract

It is shown that community structure has a great impact on traffic transportation and epidemic spreading. The density of infected nodes and the epidemic threshold have been proven to have significant relationship with the node betweenness in traffic driven epidemic spreading method. In this paper, considering the impact of community structure on traffic driven epidemic spreading, an effective and novel strategy to control epidemic spreading in scale-free networks is proposed. Theoretical analysis shows that the new control strategy will obviously increase the ratio between the first and the second moments of the node betweenness distribution in scale-free networks. It is also found that the more accurate the community is identified, the stronger community structure the network has and the more efficient the control strategy is. Simulations on both computer-generated and real-world networks have confirmed the theoretical results. © 2013 Fei Shao and Guo-Ping Jiang.