  A practical communication channel often suffers from constraints on input
other than the average power, such as the peak power constraint. In order to
compare achievable rates with different constellations as well as the channel
capacity under such constraints, it is crucial to take these constraints into
consideration properly. In this paper, we propose a direct approach to compare
the achievable rates of practical input constellations and the capacity under
such constraints. As an example, we study the discrete-time complex-valued
additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and compare the capacity under the
peak power constraint with the achievable rates of phase shift keying (PSK) and
quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) input constellations.
