An Investigation Into Epidemics Spreading On Complex Networks

The prevalence of epidemics on social networks and the frequently outbreaks of Internet worms bring on great loss and severe damage to the human beings. The complex network theory provides a new approach to investigate the epidemics spreading and control its outbreak. Investigating the spreadingdynamics will help us better understand spreading phenomenons in real world. The dissertation surveys a wide range of related works and current situationof epidemic dynamics on complex networks, including the spreading threshold theory and network topological effects on spreading. Also, we pay attention to some new fields, the epidemic dynamics among mobile agents and epidemic spreading considering planar distance. By understanding the current related works, we focus on the epidemic spreading on homogeneous small world networks with individual variation effect considered and study the critical conditions of different scenarios, as well. Furthermore, we apply the spreading theory to real-world epidemics analysis- the instant messaging worm. We analyze the spreading characteristics and study the monitor and defense of instantmessaging worm based on network topological structure.The main contribution of this dissertation is summarized as follows:1. Individual variation commonly exists in real-world. We study individualvariation effects on epidemic spreading in homogeneous small world networks, theoretically analyze the critical conditions of epidemics spreading of different scenarios.