Shannon Channel Capacity

Telecommunications Engineering

How It Works

Claude Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem establishes the absolute fundamental upper bound on the rate at which error-free digital information can be transmitted over a communication channel perturbed by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The channel capacity C depends strictly on the physical analog bandwidth B and the signal-to-noise power ratio (S/N). While transmission capacity scales linearly with available bandwidth, it increases only logarithmically with transmit power.

Governing Equation
C = B · log_2(1 + S / N)   |   C / B = log_2(1 + (E_b / N₀) · (C / B))   |   (E_b / N₀)_{min} = -1.59 dB