The Effect of Signaling Rate on Information Rate for Single Carrier Linear Transmission Systems

We consider the effect of signaling rate (baud rate) on the information rate of single carrier linear transmission systems with Gaussian inputs. Several different communication scenarios are investigated: correlated or uncorrelated symbols, a fixed modulation pulse or a modulation pulse varying with the signaling rate and frequency selective or flat channels. For uncorrelated symbols, we show that the information rate grows monotonically with signaling rate for some cases while it can in fact decrease in other cases. Sufficient conditions on the modulation pulse and the channel impulse response are derived so that the information rate is increasing with increased signaling rate. Especially, these conditions give criterias for when non-orthogonal signaling is beneficial compared to orthogonal signaling in the case of flat fading. For modulation pulses varying with the signaling rate, it is shown that there are pulses for which the information rate is non-decreasing with increasing signaling rate. When correlation between symbols is allowed, we show that one can guarantee increasing information rate with increased signaling rate, no matter the pulse-channel shape (except for some hypothetical special cases), by signaling with an SNR above a certain finite threshold.