Estimating Shannon and Constrained Capacities of Bernoulli-Gaussian Impulsive Noise Channels in Rayleigh Fading

This paper presents a novel approach to tightly estimate the ergodic Shannon and constrained capacities of an additive Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) impulsive noise channel in Rayleigh fading environments where channel gains are known at the receiver, but not at the transmitter. We first show that the differential entropy of the BG impulsive noise can be established in closed-form using Gaussian hypergeometric function ₂F₁(1, 1; ·; ·). The Shannon capacity is then calculated via upper and lower bounds. Specifically, we derive in closed-form two upper bounds on the Shannon capacity using the assumption of a Gaussian output and using full knowledge of noise state, respectively. Under the assumption of a Gaussian input, we propose a novel approach to calculate a lower bound by examining the instantaneous output entropy in two regions of channel gains. In the high-gain region, the lower bound is evaluated via the upper bound obtained under the Gaussian output assumption. In the other region, we apply the piecewise-linear curve fitting (PWLCF) method to estimate the lower bound. It is then demonstrated that the lower bound can be calculated with a predetermined accuracy. By establishing the difference between the lower bound and the two upper bounds, we show that the lower bound can be used to effectively estimate the Shannon capacity. Finally, we detail a PWLCF-based method to estimate the constrained capacity for a finite-alphabet constellation. To this end, we first propose a numerical technique to calculate the instantaneous entropy of the output using 2-dimensional (2-D) Gauss-Hermite quadrature formulas. The average output entropy is then obtained using the PWLCF method. Combined with the closed-form expression of the entropy of the BG impulsive noise, the constrained capacity can be effectively estimated.