Desynchronization of pulse-coupled oscillators with delayed excitatory coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how transmission delays in pulse-coupled oscillator networks prevent complete synchronization, explaining observed behaviors in fireflies and revealing phenomena like clustering synchronization through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a model of pulse-coupled oscillators with delayed excitatory coupling and proves that such networks cannot achieve full synchronization under reasonable assumptions.

Findings

Delayed coupling prevents complete synchronization.

Clustering synchronization can occur.

Numerical simulations illustrate phase variation and clustering phenomena.

Abstract

Collective behavior of pulse-coupled oscillators has been investigated widely. As an example of pulse-coupled networks, fireflies display many kinds of flashing patterns. Mirollo and Strogatz (1990) proposed a pulse-coupled oscillator model to explain the synchronization of South East Asian fireflies ({\itshape Pteroptyx malaccae}). However, transmission delays were not considered in their model. In fact, the presence of transmission delays can lead to desychronization. In this paper, pulse-coupled oscillator networks with delayed excitatory coupling are studied. Our main result is that under reasonable assumptions, pulse-coupled oscillator networks with delayed excitatory coupling can not achieve complete synchronization, which can explain why another species of fireflies ({\itshape Photinus pyralis}) rarely synchronizes flashing. Finally, two numerical simulations are given. In the first simulation, we illustrate that even if all the initial phases are very close to each other, there could still be big variations in the times to process the pulses in the pipeline. It implies that asymptotical synchronization typically also cannot be achieved. In the second simulation, we exhibit a phenomenon of clustering synchronization.