A closeness centrality reconnection strategy to suppress the traffic-driven epidemic spreading

Abstract

The inappropriate network structure often facilitates the epidemic spreading driven by traffic. In this paper, an edge reconnection strategy based on node closeness centrality is proposed to decrease the speed of epidemic spreading. In simulations, some evaluation indicators are introduced to measure the optimized effect. After adopting the proposed strategy, the spectral radius of optimized network gradually decreases as the number of edge reconnection increases, and eventually reaches a stable value. Consequently, the epidemic threshold, as a significant indicator to evaluate the speed of epidemic spreading, shows a noticeable increase. In addition, the comparisons of average path length and the scale of epidemic spreading can be intuitively obtained.