Simultaneous Information and Energy Transmission with Finite Constellations

In this paper, the fundamental limits on the rates at which information and energy can be simultaneously transmitted over an additive white Gaussian noise channel are studied under the following assumptions: (a) the channel is memoryless; (b) the number of channel input symbols (constellation size) and block length are finite; and (c) the decoding error probability (DEP) and the energy outage probability (EOP) are bounded away from zero. In particular, it is shown that the limits on the maximum information and energy transmission rates; and the minimum DEP and EOP, are essentially set by the type induced by the code used to perform the transmission. That is, the empirical frequency with which each channel input symbol appears in the codewords. Using this observation, guidelines for optimal constellation design for simultaneous energy and information transmission are presented.