Fair Resource Partitioning between Cell-Center and Cell-Edge of FFR-Based Multi-Tier Wireless Access Networks

This paper addresses the problem of fair radio resource partitioning between the cell-edge and cell-center regions in the context of the downlink of a SISO-OFDMA cellular system. Although, a plethora of studies concerning OFDMA-based radio resource allocation exists, it is, however, imperative to accord special attention to the proper design of network resource partitioning variables in order to ensure fairness in cell structures in which cell-wide reuse-1 is impracticable. This work focuses on the mathematical formulation of cell-edge/cell-center radio resource partitioning variables and considers the case of an FFR-based multi-layer cellular structure comprising of femtocell underlay. By way of exhaustive search procedure, we determined the optimal radio resource partitioning parameter values from the perspective of user fairness and throughput maximization.