On Modeling Viral Diffusion in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Smart phones and computers now are able to co-work in a wireless environment where malware can propagate. Although many investigations have modeled the spread of malware, little has been done to take into account different characteristics of items to see how they affect disease diffusion in an ad hoc network. We have therefore developed a novel framework, consisting of two models, which consider diversity of objects as well as interactions between their different classes. Our framework is able to produce a huge result space thus makes it appropriate to describe many viral proliferating scenarios. Additionally, we have developed a formula to calculate the possible average number of newly infected devices in the considered system. An important contribution of our work is the comprehension of item diversity, which states that a mixture of device types causes a bigger malware spread as the number of device types in the network increases.