Empirical study of the role of the topology in spreading on communication networks

Topological aspects, like community structure, and temporal activity patterns, like burstiness, have been shown to severely influence the speed of spreading in temporal networks. We study the influence of the topology on the susceptible–infected (SI) spreading on time stamped communication networks, as obtained from a dataset of mobile phone records. We consider city level networks with intra- and inter-city connections. The networks using only intra-city links are usually sparse, where the spreading depends mainly on the average degree. The inter-city links serve as bridges in spreading, speeding up considerably the process. We demonstrate the effect also on model simulations.