  Cellular systems are becoming more heterogeneous with the introduction of low
power nodes including femtocells, relays, and distributed antennas.
Unfortunately, the resulting interference environment is also becoming more
complicated, making evaluation of different communication strategies
challenging in both analysis and simulation. Leveraging recent applications of
stochastic geometry to analyze cellular systems, this paper proposes to analyze
downlink performance in a fixed-size cell, which is inscribed within a weighted
Voronoi cell in a Poisson field of interferers. A nearest out-of-cell
interferer, out-of-cell interferers outside a guard region, and cross-tier
interference are included in the interference calculations. Bounding the
interference power as a function of distance from the cell center, the total
interference is characterized through its Laplace transform. An equivalent
marked process is proposed for the out-of-cell interference under additional
assumptions. To facilitate simplified calculations, the interference
distribution is approximated using the Gamma distribution with second order
moment matching. The Gamma approximation simplifies calculation of the success
probability and average rate, incorporates small-scale and large-scale fading,
and works with co-tier and cross-tier interference. Simulations show that the
proposed model provides a flexible way to characterize outage probability and
rate as a function of the distance to the cell edge.
