The Capacity Achieving Distribution for the Amplitude Constrained Additive Gaussian Channel: An Upper Bound on the Number of Mass Points

This paper studies an n-dimensional additive Gaussian noise channel with a peak-power-constrained input. It is well known that, in this case, when n = 1 the capacity-achieving input distribution is discrete with finitely many mass points, and when n > 1 the capacity-achieving input distribution is supported on finitely many concentric shells. However, due to the previous proof technique, not even a bound on the exact number of mass points/shells was available. This paper provides an alternative proof of the finiteness of the number mass points/shells of the capacity-achieving input distribution while producing the first firm bounds on the number of mass points and shells, paving an alternative way for approaching many such problems. The first main result of this paper is an order tight implicit bound which shows that the number of mass points in the capacity-achieving input distribution is within a factor of two from the number of zeros of the downward shifted capacity-achieving output probability density function. Next, this implicit bound is utilized to provide a first firm upper on the support size of optimal input distribution, an O(A²) upper bound where A denotes the constraint on the input amplitude. The second main result of this paper generalizes the first one to the case when n > 1, showing that, for each and every dimension n ≥ 1, the number of shells that the optimal input distribution contains is O(A²). Finally, the third main result of this paper reconsiders the case n = 1 with an additional average power constraint, demonstrating a similar O(A²) bound.