# Reflected Brownian Motion

A standard Brownian motion is space-homogeneous, meaning that the behaviour of $B_{T+t}-B_T$ does not depend on the value of $B_T$. By Donsker’s Theorem, such a Brownian motion is also the limit in a process space of any homogeneous random walk with zero-drift and constant variance, after suitable rescaling.

In many applications, however, we are interested in real-valued continuous-time Markov processes that are defined not on the whole of the real line, but on the half-line $\mathbb{R}_{\ge 0}$. So as BM is the fundamental real-valued continuous-time Markov process, we should ask how we might adjust it so that it stays non-negative. In particular, we want to clarify uniqueness, or at least be sure we have found all the sensible ways to make this adjustment, and also to consider how Donsker’s Theorem might work in this setting.

We should consider what properties we want this non-negative BM to have. Obviously, it should be non-negative, but it is also reasonable to demand that it looks exactly like BM everywhere except near 0. But since BM has a scale-invariance property, it is essentially meaningful to say ‘near 0’, so we instead demand that it looks exactly like BM everywhere except at 0. Apart from this, the only properties we want are that it is Markov and has continuous sample paths.

A starting point is so-called reflected Brownian motion, defined by $X_t:=|B_t|$. This is very natural and very convenient for analysis, but there are some problems. Firstly, this has the property that it looks like Brownian motion everywhere except 0 only because BM is space-homogeneous but also symmetric, in the sense that $B_t\stackrel{d}{=}-B_t$. This will be untrue for essentially any other process, so as a general method for how to keep stochastic processes positive, this will be useless. My second objection is a bit more subtle. If we consider this as an SDE, we get

$dX_t=\text{sign}(B_t)dB_t.$

This is a perfectly reasonable SDE but it is undesirable, because we have a function of B as coefficient on the RHS. Ideally, increments of X would be a function of X, and the increments of B, rather than the values of B. That is, we would expect $X_{t+\delta t}-X_t$ to depend on $X_t$ and on $(B_{t+s}-B_t, 0\le s\le \delta t)$, but not on $B_t$ itself, as that means we have to keep track of extra information while constructing X.

So we need an alternative method. One idea might be to add some non-negative process to the BM so that the sum stays non-negative. If this process is deterministic and finite, there there is some positive probability that the sum will eventually be negative, so this won’t do. We are looking therefore so a process which depends on the BM. Obviously we could take $\max(-B_t,0)$, but this sum would then spend macroscopic intervals of time at 0, and these intervals would have the Raleigh distribution (for Brownian excursions) rather than the exponential distribution, hence the process given by the sum would not be memoryless and Markov.

The natural alternative is to look for an increasing process $A_t$, and then it makes sense to talk about the minimal increasing process that has the desired property. A moment’s thought suggests that $A_t=-min_{s\le t}B_t$ satisfies this. So we have the decomposition

$B_t=-A_t+S_t,$

where $S_t$ is the height of B above its running minimum. So S is an ideal alternative definition of reflecting BM. In particular, when B is away from its minimum, $dB_t=dS_t$, so this has the property that it evolves exactly as the driving Brownian motion.

What we have done is to decompose a general continuous process into the sum of a decreasing continuous process and a non-negative process. This is known as the Skorohod problem, and was the subject of much interest, even in the deterministic case. Note that process A has the property that it is locally constant almost everywhere, and is continuous, yet non-constant. Unsurprisingly, since A only changes when the underlying BM is 0, A is continuous with respect to the local time process at 0. In fact, A is the local time process of the underlying Brownian motion, by comparison with the construction by direct reflection.

One alternative approach is to look instead at the generator of the process. Recall that the generator of a process is an operator on some space of functions, with $\mathcal{L}f$ giving the infinitissimal drift of $f(X_t)$. In the case of Brownian motion, the generator $(\mathcal{L}f)(x)=\frac12 f''(x)$ for bounded smooth functions f. This is equivalent to saying that

$f(X_t)-f(X_0)-\int_0^t \frac12 f''(X_s)ds$ (*)

is a martingale. This must hold also for reflected Brownian motion, whenever x is greater than 0. Alternatively, if the function f is zero in a small neighbourhood of 0, it should have the same generator with respect to reflected BM. Indeed, for a general smooth bounded function f, we can still consider the expression (*) with respect to reflected BM. We know this expression behaves as a martingale except when X is zero. If f'(0)>0, and T is some hitting time of 0, then $f(X_{T+\delta T})-f(X_T)\ge 0$, hence the expression (*) is a submartingale. So if we restrict attention to functions with f'(0)=0, the generator remains the same. Indeed, by patching together all such intervals, it can be argued that even if f'(0) is not zero,

$f(X_t)-f(X_0)-\int_0^t \frac12 f''(X_s)ds - f'(0)A_t$

is a martingale, where A is the local time process at zero.

I was aware when I started reading about this that there was another family of processes called ‘Sticky Brownian Motion’ that shared properties with Reflected BM, in that it behaves like standard BM away from zero, but is also constrained to the non-negative reals. I think this will get too long if I also talk about that here, so that can be postponed, and for now we consider reflected BM as a limit of reflected (or other) random walks, bearing in mind that there is at least one other candidate to be the limit.

Unsurprisingly, if we have a family of random walks constrained to the non-negative reals, that are zero-drift unit-variance away from 0, then if they converge as processes, the limit is Brownian away from zero, and non-negative. Note that “away from 0” means after rescaling. So the key aspect is behaviour near zero.

What is the drift of reflected BM at 0? We might suspect it is infinite because of the form of the generator, but we can calculate it directly. Given $X_0=0$, we have:

$\frac{\mathbb{E}X_t}{t}=\frac{\mathbb{E}|B_t|}{t}=\frac{\sqrt{t}\mathbb{E}|B_1|}{t},$

so letting $t\rightarrow 0$, we see indeed that the drift is infinite at 0.

For convergence of discrete processes, we really need the generators to converge. Typically we index the discrete-time processes by the time unit h, which tends to 0, and $b_h(x),a_h(x)$ are the rescaled drift and square-drift from x. We assume that we don’t see macroscopic jumps in the limit. For the case of simple random walk reflected at 0, it doesn’t matter exactly how we construct the joint limit in h and x, as the drift is uniform on x>0, but in general this does matter. I don’t want to discuss sticky BM right now, so it’s probably easiest to be vague and say that the discrete Markov processes converge to reflected BM so long they don’t spend more time than expected near 0 in the limit, as the title ‘sticky’ might suggest.

The two ways in which this can happen is if the volatility term $a_h(x)$ is too small, in which case the process looks almost deterministic near 0, or if the drift doesn’t increase fast enough. And indeed, this leads to two conditions. The first is straightforward, if $a_h(x)$ is bounded below, in the sense that $\liminf_{h,x\rightarrow 0} a_h(x)\ge C>0$, then we have convergence to reflected BM. Alternatively, the only danger can arise down those subsequences where $a_h(x)\rightarrow 0$, so if we have that $b_h(x)\rightarrow +\infty$ whenever $h,x,a_h(x)\rightarrow 0$, then this convergence also holds.

Next time I’ll discuss what sticky BM means, what it doesn’t mean, why it isn’t easy to double the local time, and how to obtain sticky BM as a limit of discrete random walks in a similar way to the above.

REFERENCES

S. Varadhan – Chapter 16 from a Lecture Course at NYU can be found here.