Epidemic spreading in lattice-embedded scale-free networks

Abstract

We study geographical effects on the spread of diseases in lattice-embedded scale-free networks. The geographical structure is represented by the connecting probability of two nodes that is related to the Euclidean distance between them in the lattice. By studying the standard Susceptible-Infected model, we found that the geographical structure has great influences on the temporal behavior of epidemic outbreaks and the propagation in the underlying network: the more geographically constrained the network is, the more smoothly the epidemic spreads.