Epidemic spreading driven by biased random walks

•We study the dynamics of epidemic spreading driven by biased random walks.•We obtain the optimal parameters of our epidemic model.•We investigate the impact of network structure on our model.

Random walk is one of the basic mechanisms of many network-related applications. In this paper, we study the dynamics of epidemic spreading driven by biased random walks in complex networks. In our epidemic model, infected nodes send out infection packets by biased random walks to their neighbor nodes, and this causes the infection of susceptible nodes that receive the packets. Infected nodes recover from the infection at a constant rate λλ, and will not be infected again after recovery. We obtain the largest instantaneous number of infected nodes and the largest number of ever-infected nodes respectively, by tuning the parameter αα of the biased random walks. Simulation results on model and real-world networks show that spread of the epidemic becomes intense and widespread with increase of either delivery capacity of infected nodes, average node degree, or homogeneity of node degree distribution.