Wireless epidemic spread in dynamic human networks

Abstract

The emergence of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) has culminated in a new generation of wireless networking. New communication paradigms, which use dynamic interconnectedness as people encounter each other opportunistically, lead towards a world where digital traffic flows more easily. We focus on human-to-human communication in environments that exhibit the characteristics of social networks. This paper describes our study of information flow during epidemic spread in such dynamic human networks, a topic which shares many issues with network-based epidemiology. We explore hub nodes extracted from real world connectivity traces and show their influence on the epidemic to demonstrate the characteristics of information propagation. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.