Agent-based modeling and simulation for malware spreading in D2D networks

Abstract: This paper presents a new multi-agent model for simulating malware propagation in device-to-device (D2D) 5G networks. This model allows to understand and analyze mobile malware-spreading dynamics in such highly dynamical networks. Additionally, we present a theoretical study to validate and benchmark our proposed approach for some basic scenarios that are less complicated to model mathematically and also to highlight the key parameters of the model. Our simulations identify critical thresholds for "no propagation" and for "maximum malware propagation" and make predictions on the malware-spread velocity as well as device-infection rates. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study applying agent-based simulations for malware propagation in D2D.