Immunization against Infection Propagation in Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

Modeling spreading processes for infections has been a widely researched area owing to its application in variety of domains especially epidemic spread and worm propagation. Until recently, infection propagation models usually inspired by epidemic spreading, solely relied upon the underlying network properties without taking into account the variation in node specific properties, such as its ability to spread infection or recover from an infection. Owing to this fact, these models have been agnostic to the effects such node heterogeneity might have in the overall infection (or immunization) process. In this paper, we incorporate node properties in a well-known ac[SIRS] model for infection propagation, and propose new heuristics to curb the spread of infection in heterogeneous networks. The proposed heuristics are validated against various network topologies, including a real-world example of an email exchange network.