Capacity Bounds and High-SNR Characterization for MIMO-OWC Channels Under Average-Power Constraint

Abstract

This paper investigates the capacity of multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) optical wireless communication (OWC) channels under a total average-power constraint. Since different nonnegative input vectors can be mapped to the same image vector and thus induce the same output distribution, we formulate a nonnegative basis pursuit (NN-BP) problem to identify the minimum-l1-norm input vector for each image vector. Based on the NN-BP characterization, we derive an equivalent expression for the channel capacity in terms of the image-vector distribution. We then establish computable lower and upper capacity bounds for both nT >= nR and nT < nR cases, and prove that the proposed bounds are asymptotically tight in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Numerical results for indoor and outdoor OWC scenarios demonstrate that the proposed bounds improve upon existing ones and close the constant gap in the high-SNR regime.