Study on Coverage of Full Frequency Reuse in FFR Systems Based on Outage Probability

Abstract

A fractional frequency reuse (FFR) system is an inter-cell interference coordination scheme used in cellular networks. In FFR systems, the available bandwidth is partitioned into orthogonal subbands such that the users near the cell center adopt subbands of a frequency reuse (FR) factor equal to one (i.e., Full FR), and the users near the cell edge adopt the subbands of an FR factor greater than one (i.e., Partial FR). The proper design of Full FR coverage, which is used to distinguish Full FR regions from Partial FR regions, plays a critical role in FFR system performance. This paper studies the optimal Full FR coverage that maximizes system throughput in the downlink in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cellular networks. For MIMO systems, orthogonal space–time block codes are considered. We analytically compare the outage probabilities of Full FR and Partial FR for a given user’s location, where the outage probability is evaluated through small-scale multipath fading. By doing so, subject to the constraint that a given target outage probability (quality-of-service) is satisfied, the optimal Full FR coverage is analyzed as a function of base station (BS) power. We prove that the optimal Full FR coverage is a non-increasing function of BS power when the powers of all BSs in the network are scaled up or down at the same rate. This result offers insight into the design of Full FR coverage in relation to BS power; we gain insight into the complicated relationship between crucial FFR design parameters.