Generalized Frequency Reuse Schemes for OFDMA Networks: Optimization and Comparison

Frequency reuse is a key concept for interference mitigation and thereby enhancing cell-edge performance in OFDMA networks. Two representative strategies are Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) and Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR). Both divide a cell into a center zone and an edge zone, and differentiate their levels of frequency reuse. Previous work on FFR and SFR has focused on networks of relatively small size with standard hexagon-shaped cells. And dividing the cell edge frequency band into three parts has been a common practice so far. However, for real-life networks, this is inadequate because of the irregular cell layout. We consider generalized FFR and SFR schemes, where the number of sub-bands is not restricted to three, and for SFR the power ratio is variable. To find optimal sub-band allocation for the generalized schemes, we present an approach based on large-scale optimization to deal with networks with irregular cell layout. The optimization process allows us to analyze the impact of the number of sub-bands and the SFR power ratio on cell-edge performance, and thereby compare the reuse schemes. We conduct experiments on large networks with realistic radio propagations and present a thorough numerical comparison.