  Understanding the epidemic dynamics, and finding out efficient techniques to
control it, is a challenging issue. A lot of research has been done on targeted
immunization strategies, exploiting various global network topological
properties. However, in practice, information about the global structure of the
contact network may not be available. Therefore, immunization strategies that
can deal with a limited knowledge of the network structure are required. In
this paper, we propose targeted immunization strategies that require
information only at the community level. Results of our investigations on the
SIR epidemiological model, using a realistic synthetic benchmark with
controlled community structure, show that the community structure plays an
important role in the epidemic dynamics. An extensive comparative evaluation
demonstrates that the proposed strategies are as efficient as the most
influential global centrality based immunization strategies, despite the fact
that they use a limited amount of information. Furthermore, they outperform
alternative local strategies, which are agnostic about the network structure,
and make decisions based on random walks.
