The effect of geographical distance on epidemic spreading.

Abstract: In this paper, we introduced the geographical effect into susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model on a growing network proposed by Xie et al. [Phys. Rev. E 75 (2007) 036106] to investigate the effect of geographical distance on epidemic spreading. In our SIS model, the susceptible individual can be infected by infectious neighbors with probability , where is the average transmission rate of the virus, is one of the infected neighbors of susceptible individual is transmission rate of individual , is Euclidean distance between individual and , and is the tunable parameter. Simulation results show that the steady density of infected individuals monotonously decreases with the increment of and the epidemic threshold emerges in the scale-free networks when the effect of geographical distance is taken into account. Moreover, when the network is star-like, the density of the infected individuals shows large amplitude oscillations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]