Random walks on simplicial complexes

The notion of Laplacian of a graph can be generalized to simplicial complexes and hypergraphs, and contains information on the topology of these structures. Even for a graph, the consideration of associated simplicial complexes is interesting to understand its shape. Whereas the Laplacian of a graph has a simple probabilistic interpretation as the generator of a continuous time Markov chain on the graph, things are not so direct when considering simplicial complexes. We define here new Markov chains on simplicial complexes. For a given order~$k$, the state space is the set of $k$-cycles that are chains of $k$-simplexes with null boundary. This new framework is a natural generalization of the canonical Markov chains on graphs. We show that the generator of our Markov chain is the upper Laplacian defined in the context of algebraic topology for discrete structure. We establish several key properties of this new process: in particular, when the number of vertices is finite, the Markov chain is positive recurrent. This result is not trivial, since the cycles can loop over themselves an unbounded number of times. We study the diffusive limits when the simplicial complexes under scrutiny are a sequence of ever refining triangulations of the flat torus. Using the analogy between singular and Hodge homologies, we express this limit as valued in the set of currents. The proof of tightness and the identification of the limiting martingale problem make use of the flat norm and carefully controls of the error terms in the convergence of the generator. Uniqueness of the solution to the martingale problem is left open. An application to hole detection is carried.

Robust methods for LTE and WiMAX dimensioning

This paper proposes an analytic model for dimensioning OFDMA based networks like WiMAX and LTE systems. In such a system, users require a number of subchannels which depends on their \SNR, hence of their position and the shadowing they experience. The system is overloaded when the number of required subchannels is greater than the number of available subchannels. We give an exact though not closed expression of the loss probability and then give an algorithmic method to derive the number of subchannels which guarantees a loss probability less than a given threshold. We show that Gaussian approximation lead to optimistic values and are thus unusable. We then introduce Edgeworth expansions with error bounds and show that by choosing the right order of the expansion, one can have an approximate dimensioning value easy to compute but with guaranteed performance. As the values obtained are highly dependent from the parameters of the system, which turned to be rather undetermined, we provide a procedure based on concentration inequality for Poisson functionals, which yields to conservative dimensioning. This paper relies on recent results on concentration inequalities and establish new results on Edgeworth expansions.