Differentiable Spectrum Partition for Fractional Frequency Reuse in Multi-Cell OFDMA Networks

To mitigate inter-cell interference (ICI) and achieve higher spectrum efficiency, fractional frequency reuse (FFR) has been widely adopted by the next generation wireless systems, wherein different frequency reuse factors are applied to cell center and cell edge zones. In such conventional FFR, a contiguous radio spectrum is partitioned in a fixed fashion across all cells for edge and cell center zones. This approach evidently lacks the flexibility of inter-cell and/or intra-cell resource allocation adjustment and the capability of dealing with traffic load fluctuation and quality of service (QoS) requirements variations. This paper models the implementation of FFR in a multi-cell network environment and proposes a scheme called D-FFR that can adaptively partition radio spectrum in a distributed manner to achieve different FFR configuration among different cells. Resource demands and various inter-cell/intracell allocation constraints are accounted in D-FFR to enable differentiable inter-cell and/or intra-cell throughput and deliver higher spectrum efficiency. Analytical and extensive simulation results are provided in the paper to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.