Improving immunization strategies

We introduce an immunization method where the percentage of required vaccinations for immunity are close to the optimal value of a targeted immunization scheme of highest degree nodes. Our strategy retains the advantage of being purely local, without the need of knowledge on the global network structure or identification of the highest degree nodes. The method consists of selecting a random node and asking for a neighbor that has more links than himself or more than a given threshold and immunizing him. We compare this method to other efficient strategies on three real social networks and on a scale-free network model, and find it to be significantly more effective.