A general theoretical framework is presented for analyzing information
transmission over Gaussian channels with memoryless transceiver distortion,
which encompasses various nonlinear distortion models including transmit-side
clipping, receive-side analog-to-digital conversion, and others. The framework
is based on the so-called generalized mutual information (GMI), and the
analysis in particular benefits from the setup of Gaussian codebook ensemble
and nearest-neighbor decoding, for which it is established that the GMI takes a
general form analogous to the channel capacity of undistorted Gaussian
channels, with a reduced "effective" signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that depends
on the nominal SNR and the distortion model. When applied to specific
distortion models, an array of results of engineering relevance is obtained.
For channels with transmit-side distortion only, it is shown that a
conventional approach, which treats the distorted signal as the sum of the
original signal part and a uncorrelated distortion part, achieves the GMI. For
channels with output quantization, closed-form expressions are obtained for the
effective SNR and the GMI, and related optimization problems are formulated and
solved for quantizer design. Finally, super-Nyquist sampling is analyzed within
the general framework, and it is shown that sampling beyond the Nyquist rate
increases the GMI for all SNR. For example, with a binary symmetric output
quantization, information rates exceeding one bit per channel use are
achievable by sampling the output at four times the Nyquist rate.Comment: 32 pages (including 4 figures, 5 tables, and auxiliary materials);
submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication