How Good is Phase-Shift Keying for Peak-Limited Rayleigh Fading Channels in the Low-SNR Regime?

This paper investigates the achievable information rate of phase-shift keying (PSK) over frequency non-selective Rayleigh fading channels without channel state information (CSI). The fading process exhibits general temporal correlation characterized by its spectral density function. We consider both discrete-time and continuous-time channels, and find their asymptotics at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Compared to known capacity upper bounds under peak constraints, these asymptotics usually lead to negligible rate loss in the low-SNR regime for slowly time-varying fading channels. We further specialize to case studies of Gauss-Markov and Clarke’s fading models.