Global existence and decay estimates for nonlinear wave equations with space-time dependent dissipative term

We study the global existence and the derivation of decay estimates for nonlinear wave equations with a space-time dependent dissipative term posed in an exterior domain. The linear dissipative effect may vanish in a compact space region and, moreover, the nonlinear terms need not be in a divergence form. In order to establish higher-order energy estimates, we introduce an argument based on a suitable rescaling. The proposed method is useful to control certain derivatives of the dissipation coefficient.