Role of diffusion in an epidemic model of mobile individuals on networks

In this paper, the study of epidemic spreading of mobile individuals on networks focuses on the system in which each node of the network may be occupied by either one individual or a void, and each individual could move to a neighbour void node. It is found that for the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model, the diffusion increases the epidemic threshold for arbitrary heterogeneous networks having the degree fluctuations, and the diffusion doesn’t affect the epidemic threshold for regular random networks. In the SI model, the diffusion suppresses the epidemic spread at the early outbreak stage, which indicates that the growth time scale of outbreaks is monotonically increasing with diffusion rate d. The heterogeneous mean-field analysis is in good agreement with the numerical simulations on annealed networks