Dynamical behaviors of epidemics on scale-free networks with community structure

In this paper, we investigate in detail the epidemic spreading process in scale-free networks with community structure. In such a network, nodes tend to form sparsely linked local communities, each having dense internal connections. Different spreading rates in SIR model are adopted to describe the epidemic behavior of nodes in inner and inter communities, which makes the model more practical. In addition, in our model, we assume that if a node is infected in one community, its neighbors will move to other communities with probability p, which can decrease the epidemic size of the whole network without changing network structure. It is found in the simulation that the network without community structure is more robust than the ones with community structure. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.