Finding a Better Immunization Strategy

The problem of finding the best strategy to immunize a population or a computer network with a minimal number of immunization doses is of current interest. It has been accepted that the targeted strategies on most central nodes are most efficient for model and real networks. We present a newly developed graph-partitioning strategy which requires 5% to 50% fewer immunization doses compared to the targeted strategy and achieves the same degree of immunization of the network. We explicitly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed strategy on several model networks and also on real networks.