Immunization of networks with non-overlapping community structure

Abstract

Although community structure is ubiquitous in complex networks, few works exploit this topological property to control epidemics. In this work, devoted to networks with non-overlapping community structure (i.e., a node belongs to a single community), we propose and investigate three global immunization strategies. In order to characterize the influence of a node, various pieces of information are used such as the number of communities that the node can reach in one hop, the nature of the links (intra-community links, inter-community links), the size of the communities and the interconnection density between communities. Numerical simulations with the susceptible-infected-removed epidemiological model are conducted on both real-world and synthetic networks. Experimental results show that the proposed strategies are more effective than classical alternatives that are agnostic of the community structure. Additionally, they outperform alternative local and global strategies designed for modular networks.