While degree correlations are known to play a crucial role for spreading phenomena in networks, their impact on the propagation speed has hardly been understood. Here we investigate a tunable spreading model on scale-free networks and show that the propagation becomes slow in positively (negatively) correlated networks if nodes with a high connectivity locally accelerate (decelerate) the propagation. Examining the efficient paths offers a coherent explanation for this result, while the $k$-core decomposition reveals the dependence of the nodal spreading efficiency on the correlation. Our findings should open new pathways to delicately control real-world spreading processes.

• Received 22 July 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.015101