The effect of a memoryless nonlinearity on the spectrum of a random process

Abstract

It is shown that, for a Gaussian process and for some non-Gaussian processes, any memoryless nonlinearity has a whitening effect in the sense that the output spectrum is smoother and occupies a greater bandwidth than the input spectrum. The ratio between input and output bandwidths is investigated by using several measures of bandwidth. Also, it is shown that classes of nonlinearities exist that are equivalent in the sense of producing the same spectral transformations.