Capacity Bounds for Power– and Band–Limited Optical Intensity Channels Corrupted by Gaussian Noise

We determine upper and lower bounds on the channel capacity of power- and bandwidth-constrained optical intensity channels corrupted by white Gaussian noise. These bounds are shown to converge asymptotically at high optical signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Unlike previous investigations on low-intensity Poisson photon counting channels, such as some fiber optic links, this channel model is realistic for indoor free space optical channels corrupted by intense ambient light. An upper bound on the capacity is found through a sphere-packing argument while a lower bound is computed through the maxentropic source distribution. The role of bandwidth is expressed by way of the effective dimension of the set of signals and, together with an average optical power constraint, is used to determine bounds on the spectral efficiency of time-disjoint optical intensity signaling schemes. The bounds show that, at high optical SNRs, pulse sets based on raised-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and prolate spheroidal wave functions have larger achievable maximum spectral efficiencies than traditional rectangular pulse basis sets. This result can be considered as an extension of previous work on photon counting channels which closely model low optical intensity channels with rectangular pulse shapes.