We first introduce a class of positive linear Volterra difference equations. Then, we offer explicit criteria for uniform asymptotic stability of positive equations. Furthermore, we get a new Perron-Frobenius theorem for positive linear Volterra difference equations. Finally, we study robust stability of positive equations under structured perturbations and affine perturbations. Two explicit stability bounds with respect to these perturbations are given. POSITIVE LINEAR VOLTERRA DIFFERENCE EQUATIONS 553 for many interesting problems in Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Biology, etc. Moreover, in general, obtained results of problems for classes of positive systems are often very interesting, see [1,2,[4][5][6][7][8]. In recent times, problems of positive systems have attracted a lot of attention from researchers, see .In this paper, we first introduce a class of positive linear Volterra difference equations of the convolution typeThen, we study stability and robust stability of positive linear Volterra difference equations. It is important to note that problems of stability and robust stability of linear Volterra difference equations have been studied extensively for a long time, see [29-41] and references therein. However, to the best of our knowledge, aspects of positivity of linear Volterra difference equations have not been exploited in the literature and the main purpose of the present paper is to fill this gap. This paper belongs to a series of our papers on positive systems, which have been published only in recent times, see [5][6][7][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].The organization of this paper is as follows. In the following section, we give some notations and preliminary results that will be used in the sequel. In Section 3, we first introduce a class of positive linear Volterra difference equations of convolution type. Then, we give some explicit criteria for uniform asymptotic stability of positive equations. In Section 4, we present a new Perron-Frobenius theorem for positive linear Volterra difference equations. As a particular case of the obtained result, we get back the Perron-Frobenius theorem for positive polynomial matrices. In the last section, we study robust stability of positive equations under structured perturbations and affine perturbations. Two explicit stability bounds with respect to structured perturbations and affine perturbations are given. To the best of our knowledge, most of the results of this paper are new.
PRELIMINARIES