Information Theory of underspread WSSUS channels

Book chapter, 2011

The chapter focuses on the ultimate limit on the rate of reliable communication through Rayleigh-fading channels that satisfy the wide-sense stationary (WSS) and uncorrelated scattering (US) assumptions and are underspread. Therefore, the natural setting is an information-theoretic one, and the performance metric is channel capacity. The family of Rayleigh-fading underspread WSSUS channels constitutes a good model for real-world wireless channels: their stochastic properties, like amplitude and phase distributions match channel measurement results. The Rayleigh-fading and the WSSUS assumptions imply that the stochastic properties of the channel are fully described by a two-dimensional power spectral density (PSD) function, often referred to as scattering function. The underspread assumption implies that the scattering function is highly concentrated in the delay-Doppler plane. Two important aspects need to be accounted for by a model that aims at being realistic: neither the transmitter nor the receiver knows the realization of the channel; and the peak power of the transmit signal is limited. Based on these two aspects the chapter provides an information-theoretic analysis of Rayleigh-fading underspread WSSUS channels in the noncoherent setting, under the additional assumption that the transmit signal is peak-constrained.