Immunization for homogeneous networks with community structure

It is proved that community structure has great impact on epidemic spreading of BA networks which are highly sensitive to the targeted immunization of a small fraction of the most connected nodes. To find effective control strategies to fight the epidemic propagation in homogeneous networks with community structure, a model of pseudo-random network is presented with adjustable community structure and constant average degree. A novel immunization strategy is proposed which aims at immunizing the nodes with highest betweenness. Then the epidemic propagation with different spreading rate and different immunization fraction is investigated in this model. Simulations show that the new strategy can reduce the epidemic propagation velocity especially in the higher modularity networks. And the more the nodes are immunized the more efficient our strategy is.