Discretization and bifurcation analysis of tumor immune interaction in fractional form

A tumor immune interaction is a main topic of interest in the last couple of decades because majority of human population suffered by tumor, formed by the abnormal growth of cells and is continuously interacted with the immune system. Because of its wide range of applications, many researchers have modeled this tumor immune interaction in the form of ordinary, delay and fractional order differential equations as the majority of biological models have a long range temporal memory. So in the present work, tumor immune interaction in fractional form provides an excellent tool for the description of memory and hereditary properties of inter and intra cells. So the interaction between effector-cells, tumor cells and interleukin-2 (IL-2) are modeled by using the definition of Caputo fractional order derivative that provides the system with long-time memory and gives extra degree of freedom. Moreover, in order to achieve more efficient computational results of fractional-order system, a discretization process is performed to obtain its discrete counterpart. Furthermore, existence and local stability of fixed points are investigated for discrete model. Moreover, it is proved that two types of bifurcations such as Neimark-Sacker and flip bifurcations are studied. Finally, numerical examples are presented to support our analytical results.