Convergence of restricted additive Schwarz with impedance transmission conditions for discretised Helmholtz problems

Abstract

The Restricted Additive Schwarz method with impedance transmission conditions, also known as the Optimised Restricted Additive Schwarz (ORAS) method, is a simple overlapping one-level parallel domain decomposition method, which has been successfully used as an iterative solver and as a preconditioner for discretised Helmholtz boundary-value problems. In this paper, we give, for the first time, a convergence analysis for ORAS as an iterative solver—and also as a preconditioner—for nodal finite element Helmholtz systems of any polynomial order. The analysis starts by showing (for general domain decompositions) that ORAS is an unconventional finite element approximation of a classical parallel iterative Schwarz method, formulated at the PDE (non-discrete) level. This non-discrete Schwarz method was recently analysed in [Gong, Gander, Graham, Lafontaine, and Spence, Convergence of parallel overlapping domain decomposition methods for the Helmholtz equation], and the present paper gives a corresponding discrete version of this analysis. In particular, for domain decompositions in strips in 2-d, we show that, when the mesh size is small enough, ORAS inherits the convergence properties of the Schwarz method, independent of polynomial order. The proof relies on characterising the ORAS iteration in terms of discrete ‘impedance-to-impedance maps’, which we prove (via a novel weighted finite-element error analysis) converge as h → 0 h\rightarrow 0 in the operator norm to their non-discrete counterparts.