Taming epidemic outbreaks in mobile adhoc networks

The openness of the smartphone operating systems has increased the number of applications developed, but it has also introduced a new propagation vector for mobile malware. We model the propagation of mobile malware among humans carrying smartphones using epidemiology theory and study the problem as a function of the underlying mobility models. We define the optimal approach to heal an infected system with the help of a set of static healers that distribute patches as the T-COVER problem, which is NP-COMPLETE. We then propose three families of healer protocols that allow for a trade-off between the recovery time and the energy consumed for deploying patches. We show through simulations using the NS-3 simulator that despite lacking knowledge of the exact future, our healers obtain a recovery time within a 7.4x similar to 10x bound of the oracle solution that has knowledge of the future arrival time of all the infected nodes. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.