Upper bounds on capacity for a constrained Gaussian channel

A low-pass and a bandpass additive white Gaussian noise channel with a peak-power constraint imposed on otherwise arbitrary input signals are considered. Upper bounds on the capacity of such channels are derived. They are strictly less than the capacity of the channel when the peak-power constrain is removed and replaced by the average-power constraint, for which the Gaussian inputs are optimum. This provides the answer to an often-posed question: peak-power limiting in the case of bandlimited channels does reduce capacity, whereas in infinite bandwidth channels it does not, as is well known. For an ideal low-pass filter of bandwidth B, the upper bound is Blog 0.934P/(N₀B) for P/( N₀B)≫1, where P is the peak power of the input signal and N₀/2 is the double-sided power spectral density of the additive white Gaussian noise