Effects of Social Network Structure on Epidemic Disease Spread Dynamics with Application to Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

With the frequent appearance and spread of infectious diseases and their impact on major population areas, there is a growing interest to develop models for analyzing the dynamic behavior of epidemics. Such analysis can provide a better decision making process to combat and confine disease. In this article, we briefly survey the literature on network structure effect on disease spread models. Subsequently, we discuss an SEIR based epidemic model for different levels of aggregation of population. This model is subsequently applied to analyze virus propagation phenomena in mobile ad hoc networks. For managing this type of threat, we propose two security architectures for these networks based on several design criteria including scalability, power, and computation limitations.