Capacity Outer Bound and Degrees of Freedom of Wiener Phase Noise Channels with Oversampling

The discrete-time Wiener phase noise channel with an integrate-and-dump multi-sample receiver is studied. A novel outer bound on the capacity with an average input power constraint is derived as a function of the oversampling factor. This outer bound yields the degrees of freedom for the scenario in which the oversampling factor grows with the transmit power $P$ as $P^{\alpha}$. The result shows, perhaps surprisingly, that the largest pre-log that can be attained with phase modulation at high signal-to-noise ratio is at most $1/4$.