Cellular network coverage with inter-cell interference coordination and intra-cell diversity

Modeling cellular base stations (BSs) as a homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP), this paper provides exact expressions, in terms of a finite integral, for the coverage probability with inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) and intra-cell diversity (ICD). Despite the fact that both ICIC and ICD can significantly improve the coverage probability, they improve coverage in drastically different ways in the high-reliability regime, where the user outage probability goes to zero. In particular, we show that ICD can provide order gain while ICIC only offers linear gain. This finding contrasts the recent result showing the absence of diversity gain in retransmission in ad hoc networks.