Practical Strategy of Acquaintance Immunization without Contact Tracing

摘要

Preventing the spread of contagious diseases will bring many benefits to human's life and world economy. Pathogens spread among individuals through the contact network. Various immunization strategies have been proposed over the past two decades. Most of them assume that the full picture of the contact network is known and its topology will not change overtime. In this paper, we propose a localized immunization strategy without global knowledge of the network. In this strategy, a random nominator and co-nominator are obtained at first, and they nominate a nominee jointly to be vaccinated. To test the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, we conducted the experiments on both synthetic and real-world networks and used the epidemic threshold, degree exponent, and degree distribution to measure the effectiveness of the strategies. The proposed strategy improves the epidemic threshold of three different networks by a factor 2~3, and the degree exponent by 35%~80%.