Epidemic spread in weighted scale-free networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how epidemic spreading dynamics differ in weighted scale-free networks, revealing that weights influence infection speed and node vulnerability, with unweighted networks facilitating faster spread.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of epidemic spreading in weighted scale-free networks, highlighting the impact of link weights on spreading velocity and node infection likelihood.

Findings

Spreading velocity peaks quickly then decays as a power-law.

Nodes with larger strength are more likely to be infected.

Greater weight dispersion slows down epidemic spreading.

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate the detailed epidemic spreading process in scale-free networks with links' weights that denote familiarity between two individuals and find that spreading velocity reaches a peak quickly then decays in a power-law form. Numerical study exhibits that the nodes with larger strength is preferential to be infected, but the hierarchical dynamics are not clearly found, which is different from the well-known result in unweighed network case. In addition, also by numerical study, we demonstrate that larger dispersion of weight of networks results in slower spreading, which indicates that epidemic spreads more quickly on unweighted scale-free networks than on weighted scale-free networks with the same condition.