Analysis of the Impact of Nonlinearity on the Capacity of Communication Channels

We study the impact of nonlinearities on the transmission rate of a communication system by establishing lower and upper bounds on the channel capacity. Our analysis is based on a general transmission model that includes transmitter and receiver nonlinearities, environmental thermal noise, and receiver chain noise. Using this model, we derive lower and upper bounds for the channel capacity of additive white Gaussian noise channels, fading channels, and multiple input multiple output channels in various thermal noise and receiver noise regimes.