Traffic-driven epidemic spreading with non-uniform origin and destination selection

Abstract

The influence of transportation processes on the spread of epidemics has been extensively studied recently. However, the effect of origin-destination selection in different time and space is an overlooked issue. In this paper, we investigate a traffic-driven epidemic model in complex networks with non-uniform origin and destination selection. An analytic expression for the epidemic threshold is derived by expanding the generalized algorithm betweenness centrality into two forms that contain the roles of origin and destination, respectively. We find that both origin-destination selection patterns and routing protocols can significantly affect the spread of epidemics, mainly because they affect the frequency of use of hub nodes in the scale-free network. Regardless of the selection pattern, the efficient routing protocol is effective in suppressing the spread of epidemics. Besides, there exists an optimal value of routing parameter for each pattern, corresponding to the maximal epidemic threshold. This phenomenon can be explained by network properties and path lengths. Both numerical simulation and theoretical analysis reveal the incidence of epidemic spreading or the traffic flow varies at nodes with different degrees.