Fractional frequency reuse techniques for multi-cellular WiMAX networks

Fractional frequency reuse for the downlink of multicellular WiMAX networks is examined in this work. Three different schemes are evaluated through simulations, including distance-based and SINR-based approaches, as well as a new scheme which is based on load-balancing between different reuse regions. The proposed load-balancing scheme overcomes the main weakness of the SINR-based approach, namely its inability to manage efficiently the available resources of both Reuse-1 and Reuse-3 zones, as their size varies. The simulation results exhibit a clearly better performance of the proposed algorithm compared to distance-based and SINR-based approaches. It is shown that the employment of fractional frequency reuse with the proposed load-balancing approach improves the performance of WiMAX networks in terms of a variety of metrics, such as blocking probability and achievable bit rate.