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In the search for improved coverage and capacity, cellular networks are currently undergoing a major transformation. A thoroughly planned architecture comprised of macrocells served by large-coverage expensive base stations (BSs) is evolving toward a much more heterogeneous architecture where the macrocell network is underlaid by one or several tiers of small cells deployed in an irregular and unplanned fashion using universal frequency reuse. Major challenges of this new scenario are the problems of intercell interference (ICI) and cell association. In this paper, these two problems are tackled in a novel way by analyzing and exploiting the inherent spatial cross-tier coverage correlation due to the cochannel ICI for a two-tier network. A mathematical framework for the representation of the two-tier coverage maps and their correlation is developed based on the spatial statistical properties of the signal quality …