Vaccinating SIS epidemics in networks with zero-determinant strategy

The vulnerability of a network may suffer tremendous economic losses. From the perspective of network nodes, network security depends not only on the behavior of a node but also on that of its neighbours. We propose a non-cooperative networking vaccination game with economic incentive mechanism under a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic process. In the game each node individually decides on whether or not to invest in anti-virus protection strategies to get vaccinated such as install an anti-virus software or a firewall. On account of the competition of interests among nodes, we present a zero-determinant (ZD) strategy for a node as the administrator who takes the security of overall network into account and plays a major role in minimizing the social cost. Finally, we evaluate the performance of ZD strategies and compare the proposed method with other strategies.