The Effect upon Channel Capacity in Wireless Communications of Perfect and Imperfect Knowledge of the Channel

Abstract—We present a model for time-varying communication single-access and multiple-access channels without feedback. We consider the difference between mutual information when the receiver knows the channel perfectly and mutual information when the receiver only has an estimate of the channel. We relate the variance of the channel measurement error at the receiver to upper and lower bounds for this difference in mutual information. We illustrate the use of our bounds on a channel modeled by a Gauss–Markov process, measured by a pilot tone. We relate the rate of time variation of the channel to the loss in mutual information due to imperfect knowledge of the measured channel. Index Terms—Channel uncertainty, multiple-access channels, mutual information, time-varying channels, wireless communications