Community-based immunization in opportunistic social networks

Immunizing important nodes has been shown to be an effective solution to suppress the epidemic spreading. Most studies focus on the globally important nodes in a network, but neglect the locally important nodes in different communities. We claim that given the temporal community feature of opportunistic social networks (OSN), this strategy has a biased understanding of the epidemic dynamics, leading us to conjecture that it is not "the more central, the better" for the implementation of control strategy. In this paper, we track the evolution of community structure and study the effect of community-based immunization strategy on epidemic spreading. We first break the OSN traces down into different communities, and find that the community structure helps to delay the outbreak of epidemic. We then evaluate the local importance of nodes in communities, and show that immunizing nodes with high local importance can remarkably suppress the epidemic. More interestingly, we find that high local importance but non-central nodes play a big role in epidemic spreading process, removing them improves the immunization efficiency by 25% to 150% at different scenarios. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.