Immunizing complex networks with limited budget

Abstract

In this letter we studied the epidemic spreading on scale-free networks assuming a limited budget for immunization. We proposed a general model in which the immunity of an individual against the disease depends on its immunized friends in the network. Furthermore, we considered the possibility that each individual might be eager to pay a price to buy the vaccine and become immune against the disease. Under these assumptions we proposed an algorithm for improving the performance of all previous immunization algorithms. We also introduced a heuristic extension of the algorithm, which works well in scale-free networks.