Low-SNR Asymptotics of Cross-Receiver Mutual Information in Gaussian Channels

<div>In this paper, we analyze the low-SNR behavior of the cross-receiver mutual information (CMI) between two received signals corrupted by uncorrelated, additive Gaussian noise. This framework has use in distributed, passive sensor applications, such as passive radar and collaborative opportunistic navigation. For Gaussian and BPSK signaling, the CMI can be expressed in terms of the effective SNR between the receivers. On-off keying (OOK), while not optimal in terms of spectral efficiency for a single-receiver channel, is shown to have greater CMI than Gaussian or BPSK signaling. This is in spite of the fact that, given the same received SNRs, all three source distributions have the same linear correlation coefficient. This indicates that for OOK sources, effective SNR and correlation coefficient are not meaningful descriptors for passive receivers.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Full-length version of conference paper submission.</div>