Soft Frequency Reuse in the Uplink of an OFDMA Network

The challenges with deploying a cellular wireless communication network with static frequency reuse in an interference limited environment is that for highly loaded cells, significant regions of coverage will experience high interference levels, resulting in unserviceable low signal-to-interference values. Therefore, interference mitigation approaches as adaptive fractional frequency reuse are considered to tackle the problem. In this paper, different strategies for user and resource allocation are evaluated along with fractional frequency reuse schemes. In contrast to downlink scenarios, we investigate the performance of the OFDMA uplink. It is shown that soft frequency reuse is well-performing in the uplink although it is easy to deploy since it does not rely on resource coordination.