Adaptive power allocation for soft frequency reuse in multi-cell LTE networks

This paper presents a novel power allocation approach for soft frequency reuse (SFR) adopted in a multi-cell LTE network. Based on the fact that major inter-cell interference (ICI) is coordinated by SFR, the proposed power allocation focuses on dealing with mutual interference between cell-edge and cell-center users in the network. It is formulated as an optimization problem, where the performance of cell-edge users is optimized under the condition that desirable performance must be maintained for cell-center users. The optimal solution can be obtained by using the Lagrange decomposition method. Simulation results show that our approach can significantly improve performance of cell-edge users by achieving 20% gain over conventional SFR with average power allocation when higher performance for cell-center users is maintained.