Uplink Inter-Cell Interference Coordination through Soft Frequency Reuse

In this paper, we study an uplink ICIC (Inter-cell Interference Coordination) mechanism based on the principle of soft frequency reused SFR. The proposed approach exploits the flexibility of frequency selective scheduling and rate adaptation, while dynamically limiting the interference experienced by the neighboring cells to a predefined limit. The technique provides a flexible and efficient way of sharing UL resources between the cell-edge and cell-center users, without the need to statically classify each user into one of these two categories. It avoids the loss of trunking efficiency inherent in static classification of users according to their geographical location within the serving cell. We analyze the proposed method, and evaluate its performance using LTE as an example.