Transmission and navigation on disordered lattice networks, directed spanning forests and Brownian web

Abstract: Stochastic networks based on random point sets as nodes have attracted considerable interest in many applications, particularly in communication networks, including wireless sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks and so on. The study of such networks generally requires the nodes to be independently and uniformly distributed as a Poisson point process. In this work, we venture beyond this standard paradigm and investigate the stochastic geometry of networks obtained from \textit{directed spanning forests} (DSF) based on randomly perturbed lattices, which have desirable statistical properties as a models of spatially dependent point fields. In the regime of low disorder, we show in 2D and 3D that the DSF almost surely consists of a single tree. In 2D, we further establish that the DSF, as a collection of paths, converges under diffusive scaling to the Brownian web.