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

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.