A distributed immunization strategy based on autonomy-oriented computing

In recent years, immunization strategies have been developed for stopping epidemics in complex-network-like environments. So far, it remains to be difficult for the existing strategies to deal with distributed community networks, even though they are ubiquitous in the real world. In this paper, we propose a distributed immunization strategy based on the ideas of self-organization and positive feedback from Autonomy-Oriented Computing (AOC). The AOC-based strategy can effectively be applied to handle large-scale, dynamic networks. Our experimental results have shown that the autonomous entities deployed in this strategy can collectively find and immunize most of the highly-connected nodes in a network within just a few steps.