  In this paper we present a rigorous cost and error analysis of a multilevel
estimator based on randomly shifted Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) lattice rules for
lognormal diffusion problems. These problems are motivated by uncertainty
quantification problems in subsurface flow. We extend the convergence analysis
in [Graham et al., Numer. Math. 2014] to multilevel Quasi-Monte Carlo finite
element discretizations and give a constructive proof of the
dimension-independent convergence of the QMC rules. More precisely, we provide
suitable parameters for the construction of such rules that yield the required
variance reduction for the multilevel scheme to achieve an $\varepsilon$-error
with a cost of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-\theta})$ with $\theta < 2$, and in
practice even $\theta \approx 1$, for sufficiently fast decaying covariance
kernels of the underlying Gaussian random field inputs. This confirms that the
computational gains due to the application of multilevel sampling methods and
the gains due to the application of QMC methods, both demonstrated in earlier
works for the same model problem, are complementary. A series of numerical
experiments confirms these gains. The results show that in practice the
multilevel QMC method consistently outperforms both the multilevel MC method
and the single-level variants even for non-smooth problems.
