An Efficient Control Strategy for Traffic-Driven Epidemic Spreading by Deleting Edges

The vast majority of traditional control strategies aim at the scenario that the propagation is driven by reaction processes from nodes to all neighbours. A novel and effective control strategy for restraining epidemic spreading in the situation that epidemic pathways are defined and driven by traffic flows is proposed in this paper. It is performed by deleting edges in proper order according to their weights. The advantages of our control strategy are of facility and practical importance that such a strategy can better retain the integrity of networks. Simulation results show that the control strategy aiming at deleting edges according to the product of the degrees of two nodes of the edge is proved to be more effective. Moreover, we analyze the curve of critical epidemic threshold on deleting more and more edges and find that there is a sharp transition at the critical point after kicking out a certain fraction of edges.