Rate Statistics in Cellular Downlink: PHY Rateless vs Adaptive Modulation and Coding

In this letter, we focus on rateless coded adaptive transmission in a cellular downlink. Based on a stochastic geometry model for the locations of BSs, we evaluate the meta-distribution of rate, i.e., the distribution of rate conditioned on the point process. An accurate approximation to the distribution of per-user rate is proposed and clearly shown to provide a good match to the simulation results. We quantify the gain in the per-user rate due to physical layer rateless codes relative to the fixed-rate adaptive modulation and coding.