Fractional Frequency Reuse with Enhanced Scheduling Strategies

Abstract

Heterogeneous networks are used to meet both capacity and coverage demands in a cellular network. As the frequencies are reused due to the limited spectrum availability, there exists co-channel interference (CCI) between the high power and low power nodes in such networks apart from the CCI between high power nodes. Inter cell interference coordination (ICIC) is a big challenge towards heterogeneous network deployments since users located at the cell range expansion (CRE) area are more vulnerable to stronger interference caused by the signals from the high power nodes. To enhance capacity, achieve good user experience and improve spectral efficiency interference management techniques like fractional frequency reuse (FFR) with enhanced scheduling strategies and ICIC using expectation maximization algorithm are proposed to mitigate the effects of the CCI. The resource allocation in FFR is done for the users in the cell center (full reuse) and CRE (partial reuse) regions based on the optimum post processing signal to interference plus noise ratio threshold with different schedulers in the two regions. It is shown that a particular combination shows the best throughput performance for the proposed enhanced FFR scheme.