Virus spread in networks

  • Authors:
  • Piet Van Mieghem;Jasmina Omic;Robert Kooij

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands;Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands;Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands and TNO Information Communication Technology, Delft

  • Venue:
  • IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The influence of the network characteristics on the virus spread is analyzed in a new--the N-intertwined Markov chain--model, whose only approximation lies in the application of mean field theory. The mean field approximation is quantified in detail. The N-intertwined model has been compared with the exact 2N-state Markov model and with previously proposed "homogeneous" or "local" models. The sharp epidemic threshold τc, which is a consequence of mean field theory, is rigorously shown to be equal to τc = 1/(λmax (A)), where λmax (A) is the largest eigenvalue--the spectral radius--of the adjacency matrix A. A continued fraction expansion of the steady-state infection probability at node j is presented as well as several upper bounds.