Inter-Cell Interference Management in SC-FDMA Cellular Systems

In this paper we study the performance of a SC-FDMA cellular system when a complete Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) management strategy is implemented. We also introduce a novel sector-and-zone frequency ICI coordination scheme, derived from Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR), which succeeds on increasing the capacity of an SC-FDMA cellular system. Working together with open-loop Fractional Power Control (PFC), time-dependent scheduling (to maintain fairness constraints to all users), opportunistic scheduling in frequency domain (FD, intended to improve the overall throughput) and adaptive modulation and coding schemes (AMCS), our simulations show that our novel scheme outperforms other typical resource allocation schemes by reducing the dropping probability and increasing the supported traffic load, while guaranteeing the required level of Quality of Service (QoS) for real-time traffic.