Controlling Virus Spread Using an Intermittent Quarantine Strategy on Multiplex Networks

Abstract

Virus spreading on the Internet will negatively affect cybersecurity. An intermittent quarantine immunization strategy to control virus spreading when containing information diffusion is proposed herein. In this model, information and virus spread on different subnetworks and interact with each other. We further develop a heterogeneous mean-field approach with time delays to investigate this model and use Monte Carlo simulations to systematically investigate the spreading dynamics. For a relatively short intermittent period, the optimal information transmission probability of the virus will be significantly suppressed. However, when the intermittent period is extremely long; increasing the probability of information transmission can control the virus spreading as well as suppress the increase in the intermittent period. Finally, it is shown that the average degree of the two subnetworks does not qualitatively affect the spreading dynamics.