Per-link Reliability and Rate Control: Two Facets of the SIR Meta Distribution

Abstract

The meta distribution (MD) of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) provides fine-grained reliability performance in wireless networks modeled by point processes. In particular, for an ergodic point process, the SIR MD yields the distribution of the per-link reliability for a target SIR. Here we reveal that the SIR MD has a second important application, which is rate control. Specifically, we calculate the distribution of the SIR threshold (equivalently, the distribution of the transmission rate) that guarantees each link a target reliability and show its connection to the distribution of the per-link reliability. This connection also permits an approximate calculation of the SIR MD when only partial (local) information about the underlying point process is available.

To appear in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, 4 pages, 4 figures