Capacity Results of an Optical Intensity Channel With Input-Dependent Gaussian Noise

Abstract

This paper investigates a channel model describing optical communication based on intensity modulation. It is assumed that the main distortion is caused by additive Gaussian noise, however, with a noise variance depending on the current signal strength. Both the high-power and low-power asymptotic capacities under simultaneously both a peak-power and an average-power constraint are derived. The high-power results are based on a new firm (nonasymptotic) lower bound and a new asymptotic upper bound. The upper bound relies on a dual expression for channel capacity and the notion of capacity-achieving input distributions that escape to infinity. The lower bound is based on a new lower bound on the differential entropy of the channel output in terms of the differential entropy of the channel input. The low-power results make use of a theorem by Prelov and van der Meulen.