Extinction thresholds in a graph-based model of HIV infection dynamics

Abstract

We study a graph-based cellular automaton for HIV infection dynamics in lymph-node networks, originally introduced by Mukwembi. Each vertex represents a cell site that may be healthy, infected, or dead, and the evolution is controlled by a replacement parameter $R$, which determines whether a dead cell is replaced by an infected or a healthy cell according to the number of its infected neighbors. For a graph $G$, we introduce two extinction parameters. The parameter $\mathbf{hiv}(G)$ is the smallest value of $R$ for which extinction occurs for every admissible initial configuration, whereas $\mathbf{HIV}(G)$ is the smallest threshold such that extinction occurs for every replacement parameter greater than or equal to it. We prove the general bounds $2\leq \mathbf{hiv}(G)\leq \mathbf{HIV}(G)\leq \Delta(G)+1$ and characterize the extremal case $\mathbf{HIV}(G)=\Delta(G)+1$. We also show that the gap $\mathbf{HIV}(G)-\mathbf{hiv}(G)$ is unbounded and determine both parameters for some classical families of graphs. Finally, we study the dynamics of the model using the state-transition digraph of the system and the configurations whose trajectories converge to nontrivial periodic orbits. The results show that extinction depends not only on the replacement parameter but also on the structural properties of the underlying graph.