Stability, bifurcation and global existence of a Hopf-bifurcating periodic solution for a class of three-neuron delayed network models

In this paper a system of three delay differential equations representing a Hopfield type general model for three neurons with two-way (bidirectional) time delayed connections between the neurons and time delayed self-connection from each neuron to itself is studied. Delay independent and delay dependent sufficient conditions for linear stability, instability and the occurrence of a Hopf bifurcation about the trivial equilibrium are addressed. The partition of the resulting parametric space into regions of stability, instability, and Hopf bifurcation in the absence of self-connection is realized. To extend the local Hopf branches for large delay values a particular bidirectional delayed tri-neuron model without self-connection is investigated. Sufficient conditions for global existence of multiple non-constant periodic solutions are obtained for such a model using the global Hopf-bifurcation theorem for functional differential equations due to J. Wu and the Bendixson criterion for higher dimensional ordinary differential equations due to Li and Muldowney, and following the approach developed by Wei and Li.