Stability estimates for radial basis function methods applied to linear scalar conservation laws

We derive stability estimates for three commonly used radial basis function (RBF) methods to solve hyperbolic time-dependent PDEs: the RBF generated finite difference (RBF-FD) method, the RBF partition of unity method (RBF-PUM) and Kansa’s (global) RBF method. We give the estimates in the discrete ${\mathrm{\ell }}_2$-norm intrinsic to each of the three methods. The results show that Kansa’s method and RBF-PUM can be ${\mathrm{\ell }}_2$-stable in time under a sufficiently large oversampling of the discretized system of equations. The RBF-FD method in addition requires stabilization of the spurious jump terms due to the discontinuous RBF-FD cardinal basis functions. Numerical experiments show an agreement with our theoretical observations.