Traffic-Driven Epidemic Spreading in Networks: Considering the Transition of Infection From Being Mild to Severe.

Realistic epidemic spreading is usually driven by traffic flow in networks, which is not captured in classic diffusion models. Moreover, the progress of a node's infection from mild to severe phase has not been particularly addressed in previous epidemic modeling. To address these issues, we propose a novel traffic-driven epidemic spreading model by introducing a new epidemic state, that is, the severe state, which characterizes the serious infection of a node different from the initial mild infection. We derive the dynamic equations of our model with the tools of individual-based mean-field approximation and continuous-time Markov chain. We find that, besides infection and recovery rates, the epidemic threshold of our model is determined by the largest real eigenvalue of a communication frequency matrix we construct. Finally, we study how the epidemic spreading is influenced by representative distributions of infection control resources. In particular, we observe that the uniform and Weibull distributions of control resources, which have very close performance, are much better than the Pareto distribution in suppressing the epidemic spreading.

Traffic congestion and the lifetime of networks with moving nodes.

For many power-limited networks, such as wireless sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks, maximizing the network lifetime is the first concern in the related designing and maintaining activities. We study the network lifetime from the perspective of network science. In our model, nodes are initially assigned a fixed amount of energy moving in a square area and consume the energy when delivering packets. We obtain four different traffic regimes: no, slow, fast, and absolute congestion regimes, which are basically dependent on the packet generation rate. We derive the network lifetime by considering the specific regime of the traffic flow. We find that traffic congestion inversely affects network lifetime in the sense that high traffic congestion results in short network lifetime. We also discuss the impacts of factors such as communication radius, node moving speed, routing strategy, etc., on network lifetime and traffic congestion.

Traffic-driven SIR epidemic spreading in networks.

We study SIR epidemic spreading in networks driven by traffic dynamics, which are further governed by static routing protocols. We obtain the maximum instantaneous population of infected nodes and the maximum population of ever infected nodes through simulation. We find that generally more balanced load distribution leads to more intense and wide spread of an epidemic in networks. Increasing either average node degree or homogeneity of degree distribution will facilitate epidemic spreading. When packet generation rate ρ is small, increasing ρ favors epidemic spreading. However, when ρ is large enough, traffic congestion appears which inhibits epidemic spreading.