The calculation of the SIR distribution at the typical receiver (or, equivalently, the success probability of transmissions over the typical link) in Poisson bipolar and cellular networks with Rayleigh fading is relatively straightforward, but it only provides limited information on the success probabilities of the individual links. This paper introduces the notion of the meta distribution of the SIR, which is the distribution of the conditional success probability @math given the point process, and provides bounds, an exact analytical expression, and a simple approximation for it. The meta distribution provides fine-grained information on the SIR and answers questions such as "What fraction of users in a Poisson cellular network achieve 90 link reliability if the required SIR is 5 dB?". Interestingly, in the bipolar model, if the transmit probability @math is reduced while increasing the network density @math such that the density of concurrent transmitters @math stays constant as @math , @math degenerates to a constant, i.e., all links have exactly the same success probability in the limit, which is the one of the typical link. In contrast, in the cellular case, if the interfering base stations are active independently with probability @math , the variance of @math approaches a non-zero constant when @math is reduced to @math while keeping the mean success probability constant.
The interference in wireless networks is temporally correlated, since the node or user locations are correlated over time and the interfering transmitters are a subset of these nodes. For a wireless network where (potential) interferers form a Poisson point process and use ALOHA for channel access, we calculate the joint success and outage probabilities of n transmissions over a reference link. The results are based on the diversity polynomial, which captures the temporal interference correlation. The joint outage probability is used to determine the diversity gain (as the SIR goes to infinity), and it turns out that there is no diversity gain in simple retransmission schemes, even with independent Rayleigh fading over all links. We also determine the complete joint SIR distribution for two transmissions and the distribution of the local delay, which is the time until a repeated transmission over the reference link succeeds. Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) and intra-cell diversity (ICD) play important roles in improving cellular downlink coverage. By modeling cellular base stations (BSs) as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP), this paper provides explicit finite-integral expressions for the coverage probability with ICIC and ICD, taking into account the temporal spectral correlation of the signal and interference. In addition, we show that, in the high-reliability regime, where the user outage probability goes to zero, ICIC and ICD affect the network coverage in drastically different ways: ICD can provide order gain, whereas ICIC only offers linear gain. In the high-spectral efficiency regime where the SIR threshold goes to infinity, the order difference in the coverage probability does not exist; however, a linear difference makes ICIC a better scheme than ICD for realistic path loss exponents. Consequently, depending on the SIR requirements, different combinations of ICIC and ICD optimize the coverage probability.