Study on the Average Size of the Longest-Edge Propagation Path for Triangulations

For a triangle t in a triangulation tau, the "longest edge propagating path" Lepp(t), is a finite sequence of neighbor triangles with increasing longest edges. In this paper we study mathematical properties of the LEPP construct. We prove that the average LEPP size over triangulations of random points sets, is between 2 and 4 with standard deviation less than or equal to root 6. Then by using analysis of variance and regression analysis we study the statistical behavior of the average LEPP size for triangulations of random point sets obtained with uniform, normal, normal bivariate and exponential distributions. We provide experimental results for verifying that the average LEPP size is in agreement with the analytically derived one.