Virus propagation power of the dynamic network

Abstract

With the development of mobile networks, propagation characteristics and defense mechanism of the virus have attracted increasing research attention. But current researches are mainly concerned with static network topology or community structure and some studies focus on characteristics of virus and malware. Little attention is paid to the influence of dynamic changes of network topology to virus propagation. Meanwhile, many studies focus on the threshold rate of the infection (or the immunization rate) for virus outbreak. In this paper, we present a new way to assess and restrain virus propagation by proposing the concepts of propagation power and propagation structure. Three basic propagation structures are presented through which the infection risk can be quantified, and a framework is proposed to assess the impact of virus propagation in different network structures. The relationship between the speed of virus propagation and network structure is also explored. An algorithm is designed to assess the propagation power in a dynamic network with no need to redetect the community under the dynamic network which may significantly improve the efficiency of assessment in a large-scale dynamic network. This study offers a feasible approach for quantifying the risk of virus infection in the network community which is valuable for designing and optimizing the virus defense systems. © 2013 Liao et al.; licensee Springer.