Adapting fractional frequency reuse to realistic OFDMA cellular networks

Abstract

Effective intercell interference (ICI) mitigation has been identified as a key challenge for emerging OFDMA cellular technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE). In order to address this issue, mobile operators have adopted static Intercell Interference Coordination (ICIC) strategies, including Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR), given their low complexity and easy implementation. However, recent results made evident the need for additional research efforts as the performance of FFR is poor in realistic cellular deployments. Thus, this paper presents a solution to this problem by means of a novel multiobjective optimization framework able to adapt FFR to any realistic cellular layout. By tuning the operational parameters of FFR at cell level, the proposed scheme succeeds in finding solutions outperforming reference schemes and baseline designs in terms of network capacity and cell edge performance while keeping energy consumption as low as possible.