A Tight Upper Bound on the Second-Order Coding Rate of the Parallel Gaussian Channel With Feedback

Abstract

This paper investigates the asymptotic expansion for the maximum rate of fixed-length codes over a parallel Gaussian channel with feedback under the following setting: a peak power constraint is imposed on every transmitted codeword, and the average error probabilities of decoding the transmitted message are non-vanishing as the blocklength increases. The main contribution of this paper is a self-contained proof of an upper bound on the first- and second-order asymptotics of the parallel Gaussian channel with feedback. The proof techniques involve developing an information spectrum bound followed by using Curtiss’ theorem to show that a sum of dependent random variables associated with the information spectrum bound converges in distribution to a sum of independent random variables, thus facilitating the use of the usual central limit theorem. Combined with existing achievability results, our result implies that the presence of feedback does not improve the first- and second-order asymptotics.