On the Capacity of the Oversampled Wiener Phase Noise Channel

Abstract

In this paper, the capacity of the oversampled Wiener phase noise (OWPN) channel is investigated. The OWPN channel is a discrete-time point-to-point channel with a multi-sample receiver in which the channel output is affected by both additive and multiplicative noise. The additive noise is a white standard Gaussian process while the multiplicative noise is a Wiener phase noise process. This channel generalizes a number of channel models previously studied in the literature which investigate the effects of phase noise on the channel capacity, such as the Wiener phase noise channel and the non-coherent channel. We derive upper and inner bounds to the capacity of OWPN channel: (i) an upper bound is derived through the I-MMSE relationship by bounding the Fisher information when estimating a phase noise sample given the past channel outputs and phase noise realizations, then (ii) two inner bounds are shown: one relying on coherent combining of the oversampled channel outputs and one relying on non-coherent combining of the samples. After capacity, we study generalized degrees of freedom (GDoF) of the OWPN channel for the case in which the oversampling factor grows with the average transmit power $P$ as $P$? and the frequency noise variance as $P^{\alpha}$?. Using our new capacity bounds, we derive the GDoF region in three regimes: regime (i) in which the GDoF region equals that of the classic additive white Gaussian noise (for $\beta \leq 1$), one (ii) in which GDoF region reduces to that of the non-coherent channel (for $\beta \geq \min \{\alpha,1\}$) and, finally, one in which partially-coherent combining of the over-samples is asymptotically optimal (for $2 \alpha-1\leq \beta \leq 1$). Overall, our results are the first to identify the regimes in which different oversampling strategies are asymptotically optimal.