  The noncoherent capacity of stationary discrete-time fading channels is known
to be very sensitive to the fine details of the channel model. More
specifically, the measure of the set of harmonics where the power spectral
density of the fading process is nonzero determines if capacity grows
logarithmically in SNR or slower than logarithmically. An engineering-relevant
problem is to characterize the SNR value at which this sensitivity starts to
matter.
  In this paper, we consider the general class of continuous-time
Rayleigh-fading channels that satisfy the wide-sense stationary
uncorrelated-scattering (WSSUS) assumption and are, in addition, underspread.
For this class of channels, we show that the noncoherent capacity is close to
the AWGN capacity for all SNR values of practical interest, independently of
whether the scattering function is compactly supported or not. As a byproduct
of our analysis, we obtain an information-theoretic pulse-design criterion for
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems.
