The noncoherent capacity of stationary discrete-time fading channels is known to be very sensitive to the fine details of the channel model. More specifically, the measure of the set of harmonics where the power spectral density of the fading process is nonzero determines if capacity grows logarithmically in SNR or slower than logarithmically. An engineering-relevant problem is to characterize the SNR value at which this sensitivity starts to matter.
In this paper, we consider the general class of continuous-time Rayleigh-fading channels that satisfy the wide-sense stationary uncorrelated-scattering (WSSUS) assumption and are, in addition, underspread. For this class of channels, we show that the noncoherent capacity is close to the AWGN capacity for all SNR values of practical interest, independently of whether the scattering function is compactly supported or not. As a byproduct of our analysis, we obtain an information-theoretic pulse-design criterion for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems.
We characterize the capacity of the general class of noncoherent underspread wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) time-frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels, under peak constraints in time and frequency and in time only. Capacity upper and lower bounds are found which are explicit in the channel's scattering function and allow to identify the capacity-maximizing bandwidth for a given scattering function and a given peak-to-average power ratio.
This paper, mostly tutorial in nature, deals with the problem of characterizing the capacity of fading channels in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. We focus on the practically relevant noncoherent setting, where neither transmitter nor receiver know the channel realizations, but both are aware of the channel law. We present, in an intuitive and accessible form, two tools, first proposed by Lapidoth & Moser (2003), of fundamental importance to high-SNR capacity analysis: the duality approach and the escape-to-infinity property of capacity-achieving distributions. Furthermore, we app…
The noncoherent capacity of stationary discrete-time fading channels is known to be very sensitive to the fine details of the channel model. More specifically, the measure of the support of the fading-process power spectral density (PSD) determines if noncoherent capacity grows logarithmically in SNR or slower than logarithmically. Such a result is unsatisfactory from an engineering point of view, as the support of the PSD cannot be determined through measurements. The aim of this paper is to assess whether, for general continuous-time Rayleigh-fading channels, this sensitivity has a noticeabl…
We study the high-SNR capacity of MIMO Rayleigh block-fading channels in the noncoherent setting where neither transmitter nor receiver has a priori channel state information. We show that when the number of receive antennas is sufficiently large and the temporal correlation within each block is "generic" (in the sense used in the interference-alignment literature), the capacity pre-log is given by T(1-1/N) for T<N, where T denotes the number of transmit antennas and N denotes the block length. A comparison with the widely used constant block-fading channel (where the fading is constant within…
The memoryless noncoherent single-input single-output (SISO) Rayleigh-fading channel is considered. Closed-form expressions for the mutual information between the output and the input of this channel when the input magnitude distribution is discrete and restricted to having two mass points are derived, and it is subsequently shown how these expressions can be used to obtain closed-form expressions for the capacity of this channel for signal to noise ratio (SNR) values of up to approximately 0 dB, and a tight capacity lower bound for SNR values between 0 dB and 10 dB. The expressions for the ch…
Capacity of M-ary Amplitude and Phase-Shift Keying(M-APSK) over an Additive White Gaussian Noise(AWGN) channel that also introduces an unknown carrier phase rotation is considered. The phase remains constant over a block of L symbols and it is independent from block to block. Aiming to design codes with equally probable symbols, uniformly distributed channel inputs are assumed. Based on results of Peleg and Shamai for M-ary Phase Shift Keying(M-PSK) modulation, easily computable upper and lower bounds on the effective M-APSK capacity are derived. For moderate M and L and a broad range of Signa…
Discrete-time Rayleigh fading single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels are considered, with no channel state information at the transmitter or the receiver. The fading is assumed to be stationary and correlated in time, but independent from antenna to antenna. Peak-power and average-power constraints are imposed on the transmit antennas. For MIMO channels, these constraints are either imposed on the sum over antennas, or on each individual antenna. For SISO channels and MIMO channels with sum power constraints, the asymptotic capacity as the peak sig…
We derive bounds on the noncoherent capacity of wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) channels that are selective both in time and frequency, and are underspread, i.e., the product of the channel's delay spread and Doppler spread is small. For input signals that are peak constrained in time and frequency, we obtain upper and lower bounds on capacity that are explicit in the channel's scattering function, are accurate for a large range of bandwidth and allow to coarsely identify the capacity-optimal bandwidth as a function of the peak power and the channel's scattering function.…
We consider communication over the block noncoherent AWGN channel with low-precision Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) at the receiver. For standard uniform Phase Shift Keying (PSK) modulation, we investigate the performance of a receiver architecture that quantizes only the phase of the received signal; this has the advantage of being implementable without automatic gain control, using multiple 1-bit ADCs preceded by analog multipliers. We study the structure of the transition density of the resulting channel model. Several results, based on the symmetry inherent in the channel, are provide…
We find the capacity pre-log of a temporally correlated Rayleigh block-fading SIMO channel in the noncoherent setting. It is well known that for block-length L and rank of the channel covariance matrix equal to Q, the capacity pre-log in the SISO case is given by 1-Q/L. Here, Q/L can be interpreted as the pre-log penalty incurred by channel uncertainty. Our main result reveals that, by adding only one receive antenna, this penalty can be reduced to 1/L and can, hence, be made to vanish in the large-L limit, even if Q/L remains constant as L goes to infinity. Intuitively, even though the SISO c…
Communication channels are said to be underspread if their coherence time is greater than their delay spread. In such cases it can be shown that in the infinite bandwidth limit the information capacity tends to that of a channel with perfect receiver Channel State Information (CSI). This paper presents a lower bound on the capacity of a channel with finite bandwidth, expressed in a form which is mathematically elegant, and computationally simple. The bounding method exploits the fact that most actual channels are highly underspread; and that typically more is known about their impulse response…
Transmission of information over a discrete-time memoryless Rician fading channel is considered where neither the receiver nor the transmitter knows the fading coefficients. First the structure of the capacity-achieving input signals is investigated when the input is constrained to have limited peakedness by imposing either a fourth moment or a peak constraint. When the input is subject to second and fourth moment limitations, it is shown that the capacity-achieving input amplitude distribution is discrete with a finite number of mass points in the low-power regime. A similar discrete structur…
We derive a lower bound on the capacity pre-log of a temporally correlated Rayleigh block-fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with T transmit antennas and R receive antennas in the noncoherent setting (no a priori channel knowledge at the transmitter and the receiver). In this model, the fading process changes independently across blocks of length L and is temporally correlated within each block for each transmit-receive antenna pair, with a given rank Q of the corresponding correlation matrix. Our result implies that for almost all choices of the coloring matrix that models t…
The capacity of noncoherent fading relay channels is studied where all terminals are aware of the fading statistics but not of their realizations. It is shown that if the fading coefficient of the channel between the transmitter and the receiver can be predicted more accurately from its infinite past than the fading coefficient of the channel between the relay and the receiver, then at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) the relay does not increase capacity. It is further shown that if the fading coefficient of the channel between the transmitter and the relay can be predicted more accurately fro…
We analyze the capacity of a continuous-time, time-selective, Rayleigh block-fading channel in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. The fading process is assumed stationary within each block and to change independently from block to block; furthermore, its realizations are not known a priori to the transmitter and the receiver (noncoherent setting). A common approach to analyzing the capacity of this channel is to assume that the receiver performs matched filtering followed by sampling at symbol rate (symbol matched filtering). This yields a discrete-time channel in which each transmit…
The high-SNR capacity of the noncoherent MIMO channel has been derived for the case of independent and identically distributed (IID) Rayleigh block fading by exploiting the Gaussianity of the channel matrix. This implies the optimal degrees of freedom (DoF), i.e., the capacity pre-log factor. Nevertheless, as far as the optimal DoF is concerned, IID Rayleigh fading is apparently a sufficient but not necessary condition. In this paper, we show that the optimal DoF for the IID Rayleigh block fading channel is also the optimal DoF for a more general class of generic block fading channels, in whic…
We establish an upper bound on the noncoherent capacity pre-log of temporally correlated block-fading single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channels. The upper bound matches the lower bound recently reported in Riegler et al. (2011), and, hence, yields a complete characterization of the SIMO noncoherent capacity pre-log, provided that the channel covariance matrix satisfies a mild technical condition. This result allows one to determine the optimal number of receive antennas to be used to maximize the capacity pre-log for a given block-length and a given rank of the channel covariance matrix.
Analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) is a key bottleneck in scaling DSP-centric receiver architectures to multiGigabit/s speeds. Recent information-theoretic results, obtained under ideal channel conditions (perfect synchronization, no dispersion), indicate that low-precision ADC (1-4 bits) could be a suitable choice for designing such high speed systems. In this work, we study the impact of employing low-precision ADC in a {\it carrier asynchronous} system. Specifically, we consider transmission over the block noncoherent Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, and investigate the achieva…
In this paper, we consider noncoherent random linear coding networks (RLCNs) as a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) whose input and output alphabets consist of subspaces. This contrasts with previous channel models in the literature which assume matrices as the channel input and output. No particular assumptions are made on the network topology or the transfer matrix, except that the latter may be rank-deficient according to some rank deficiency probability distribution. We introduce a random vector basis selection procedure which renders the DMC symmetric. The capacity we derive can be seen a…
The capacity of discrete-time, noncoherent, multipath fading channels is considered. It is shown that if the variances of the path gains decay faster than exponentially, then capacity is unbounded in the transmit power.
We establish a lower bound on the noncoherent capacity pre-log of a temporally correlated Rayleigh block-fading single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channel. Our result holds for arbitrary rank Q of the channel correlation matrix, arbitrary block-length L > Q, and arbitrary number of receive antennas R, and includes the result in Morgenshtern et al. (2010) as a special case. It is well known that the capacity pre-log for this channel in the single-input single-output (SISO) case is given by 1-Q/L, where Q/L is the penalty incurred by channel uncertainty. Our result reveals that this penalty can…
A noncoherent two-way relaying system is developed using physical-layer network coding for improved throughput over conventional relaying in a fading channel. Energy-efficient noncoherent operation is achieved using multitone frequency shift keying (FSK). A novel soft-output demodulator is developed for the relay, and corresponding achievable exchange rates are found for Rayleigh fading and AWGN channels. Bit-error rate performance approaching the achievable rate is realized using a capacity-approaching channel code and a receiver architecture that iterates between demodulation and channel dec…
Analog network coding (ANC) is a throughput increasing technique for the two-way relay channel (TWRC) whereby two end nodes transmit simultaneously to a relay at the same time and band, followed by the relay broadcasting the received sum of signals to the end nodes. Coherent reception under ANC is challenging due to requiring oscillator synchronization for all nodes, a problem further exacerbated by Doppler shift. This work develops a noncoherent M-ary frequency-shift keyed (FSK) demodulator implementing ANC. The demodulator produces soft outputs suitable for use with capacity-approaching chan…
Physical-layer network coding improves the throughput of the two-way relay channel by allowing multiple source terminals to transmit simultaneously to the relay. However, it is generally not feasible to align the phases of the multiple received signals at the relay, which motivates the exploration of noncoherent solutions. In this paper, turbo-coded orthogonal multi-tone frequency-shift keying (FSK) is considered for the two-way relay channel. In contrast with analog network coding, the system considered is an instance of digital network coding; i.e., the relay decodes the network codeword and…
The analysis of the channel capacity in the absence of prior channel knowledge (noncoherent channel) has gained increasing interest in recent years, but it is still unknown for the general case. In this paper we derive bounds on the capacity of the noncoherent, underspread complex Gaussian, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), wide sense stationary channel with uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS), under a peak power constraint or a constraint on the second and fourth moments of the transmitted signal. These bounds are characterized only by the system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and b…
We consider a noncoherent wireless network, where the transmitters and receivers are cognizant of the statistics of the fading coefficients, but are ignorant of their realizations. We demonstrate that if the nodes do not cooperate, if they transmit symbols that all follow the same distribution, and if the variances of the fading coefficients decay exponentially or more slowly, then the channel capacity is bounded in the SNR. This confirms a similar result by Lozano, Heath, and Andrews.
Reliable communication over the discrete-input/continuous-output noncoherent multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh block fading channel is considered when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per degree of freedom is low. Two key problems are posed and solved to obtain the optimum discrete input. In both problems, the average and peak power per space-time slot of the input constellation are constrained. In the first one, the peak power to average power ratio (PPAPR) of the input constellation is held fixed, while in the second problem, the peak power is fixed independently of the average p…
This paper considers the problem of reliable communication over discrete-time channels whose impulse responses have length $L$ and exactly $S\leq L$ non-zero coefficients, and whose support and coefficients remain fixed over blocks of $N>L$ channel uses but change independently from block to block. Here, it is assumed that the channel's support and coefficient realizations are both unknown, although their statistics are known. Assuming Gaussian non-zero-coefficients and noise, and focusing on the high-SNR regime, it is first shown that the ergodic noncoherent channel capacity has pre-log facto…
The low-snr capacity of M-ary PSK transmission over both the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channels is analyzed when hard-decision detection is employed at the receiver. Closed-form expressions for the first and second derivatives of the capacity at zero snr are obtained. The spectral-efficiency/bit-energy tradeoff in the low-snr regime is analyzed by finding the wideband slope and the bit energy required at zero spectral efficiency. Practical design guidelines are drawn from the information-theoretic analysis. The fading channel analysis is conducted for both coherent and no…
We study channel capacity when a one-bit quantizer is employed at the output of the discrete-time average-power-limited Rayleigh-fading channel. We focus on the low signal-to-noise ratio regime, where communication at very low spectral efficiencies takes place, as in Spread Spectrum and Ultra-Wideband communications. We demonstrate that, in this regime, the best one-bit quantizer does not reduce the asymptotic capacity of the coherent channel, but it does reduce that of the noncoherent channel.
This paper studies the capacity of discrete-time multipath fading channels. It is assumed that the number of paths is finite, i.e., that the channel output is influenced by the present and by the L previous channel inputs. A noncoherent channel model is considered where neither transmitter nor receiver are cognizant of the fading's realization, but both are aware of its statistic. The focus is on capacity at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). In particular, the capacity pre-loglog - defined as the limiting ratio of the capacity to loglog SNR as SNR tends to infinity - is studied. It is shown t…
We derive bounds on the noncoherent capacity of a very general class of multiple-input multiple-output channels that allow for selectivity in time and frequency as well as for spatial correlation. The bounds apply to peak-constrained inputs; they are explicit in the channel's scattering function, are useful for a large range of bandwidth, and allow to coarsely identify the capacity-optimal combination of bandwidth and number of transmit antennas. Furthermore, we obtain a closed-form expression for the first-order Taylor series expansion of capacity in the limit of infinite bandwidth. From this…
This work studies the capacity of multipath fading channels. A noncoherent channel model is considered, where neither the transmitter nor the receiver is cognizant of the realization of the path gains, but both are cognizant of their statistics. It is shown that if the delay spread is large in the sense that the variances of the path gains decay exponentially or slower, then capacity is bounded in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For such channels, capacity does not tend to infinity as the SNR tends to infinity. In contrast, if the variances of the path gains decay faster than exponentially, t…
We characterize the capacity of Rayleigh block-fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in the noncoherent setting where transmitter and receiver have no a priori knowledge of the realizations of the fading channel. We prove that unitary space-time modulation (USTM) is not capacity-achieving in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime when the total number of antennas exceeds the coherence time of the fading channel (expressed in multiples of the symbol duration), a situation that is relevant for MIMO systems with large antenna arrays (large-MIMO systems). This result settles a…
Recent research has demonstrated significant achievable performance gains by exploiting circularity/non-circularity or propeness/improperness of complex-valued signals. In this paper, we investigate the influence of these properties on important information theoretic quantities such as entropy, divergence, and capacity. We prove two maximum entropy theorems that strengthen previously known results. The proof of the former theorem is based on the so-called circular analog of a given complex-valued random vector. Its introduction is supported by a characterization theorem that employs a minimum …
Several information-theoretic studies on channels with output quantization have identified the capacity-achieving input distributions for different fading channels with 1-bit in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) output quantization. However, an exact characterization of the capacity-achieving input distribution for channels with multi-bit phase quantization has not been provided. In this paper, we consider four different channel models with multi-bit phase quantization at the output and identify the optimal input distribution for each channel model. We first consider a complex Gaussian channel with $…
The capacity of peak-power limited, single-antenna, noncoherent, flat-fading channels with memory is considered. The emphasis is on the capacity pre-log, i.e., on the limiting ratio of channel capacity to the logarithm of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), as the SNR tends to infinity. It is shown that, among all stationary & ergodic fading processes of a given spectral distribution function and whose law has no mass point at zero, the Gaussian process gives rise to the smallest pre-log. The assumption that the law of the fading process has no mass point at zero is essential in the sense that th…
To understand the network response to large-scale physical attacks, we investigate the asymptotic capacity of a half-duplex fading relay network with random node failures when the number of relays $N$ is infinitely large. In this paper, a simplified independent attack model is assumed where each relay node fails with a certain probability. The noncoherent relaying scheme is considered, which corresponds to the case of zero forward-link channel state information (CSI) at the relays. Accordingly, the whole relay network can be shown equivalent to a Rayleigh fading channel, where we derive the $ε…
A nonlinear detector derived within a maximum likelihood estimation framework is shown to be effective in retrieving the channel coefficients and data of users on the uplink channel of a noncooperative wireless system without the access point having any prior channel state information (no CSI or noncoherent setup). Rather than relying on pilot-assisted transmissions, it is shown that a maximum likelihood-based detector emerges naturally from an information-theoretic argument. The assumptions under which the detector is designed are as follows: 1) the uplink data from different users are indepe…
This paper proposes a new method for optimizing frequency-hopping ad hoc networks in the presence of Rayleigh fading. It is assumed that the system uses a capacity-approaching code (e.g., turbo or LDPC) and noncoherent binary continuous-phase frequency-shift keying (CPFSK) modulation. By using transmission capacity as the performance metric, the number of hopping channels, CPFSK modulation index, and code rate are jointly optimized. Mobiles in the network are assumed to be uniformly located within a finite area. Closed-form expressions for outage probability are given for a network characteriz…
We present a novel closed-form lower bound on the Gaussian-input mutual information for noncoherent communication (i.e., in which neither transmitter nor receiver are cognizant of the fading state) over a frequency-flat fading channel with additive noise. Our bound yields positive (non-trivial) values even in the most challenging case of zero-mean fast fading, a regime in which the conventional approach of orthogonal time-multiplexed pilots is unavailing and for which, to the best of the author's knowledge, no simple analytical bound is known. Its derivation relies on endowing the transmit sig…
We study the capacity of the discrete-time Gaussian channel when its output is quantized with a one-bit quantizer. We focus on the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, where communication at very low spectral efficiencies takes place. In this regime a symmetric threshold quantizer is known to reduce channel capacity by a factor of 2/pi, i.e., to cause an asymptotic power loss of approximately two decibels. Here it is shown that this power loss can be avoided by using asymmetric threshold quantizers and asymmetric signaling constellations. To avoid this power loss, flash-signaling input dist…
In this paper, the capacity and energy efficiency of training-based communication schemes employed for transmission over a-priori unknown Rayleigh block fading channels are studied. In these schemes, periodically transmitted training symbols are used at the receiver to obtain the minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) estimate of the channel fading coefficients. Initially, the case in which the product of the estimate error and transmitted signal is assumed to be Gaussian noise is considered. In this case, it is shown that bit energy requirements grow without bound as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)…
We studynthe high-SNR capacity of generic MIMO Rayleigh block-fading channels in the noncoherent setting where neither transmitter nor receiver has a priori channel state information but both are aware of the channel statistics. In contrast to the well-established constant block-fading model, we allow the fading to vary within each block with a temporal correlation that is "generic" (in the sense used in the interference-alignment literature). We show that the number of degrees of freedom of a generic MIMO Rayleigh block-fading channel with $T$ transmit antennas and block length $N$ is given b…
We analyze the sensitivity of the capacity of a multi-antenna multi-user system to the number of users being served. We show analytically that, for a given desired sum-rate, the extra power needed to serve a subset of the users at low SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) can be very small, and is generally much smaller than the extra power needed to serve the same subset at high SNR. The advantages of serving only subsets of the users are many: multi-user algorithms have lower complexity, reduced channel-state information requirements, and, often, better performance. We provide guidelines on how many u…
Recently, several methods have been proposed for estimating the mutual information from sample data using deep neural networks and without the knowing closed form distribution of the data. This class of estimators is referred to as neural mutual information estimators. Although very promising, such techniques have yet to be rigorously bench-marked so as to establish their efficacy, ease of implementation, and stability for capacity estimation which is joint maximization frame-work. In this paper, we compare the different techniques proposed in the literature for estimating capacity and provide…
