Advanced packet scheduling in soft frequency reuse scenarios for multiantenna packet radio systems

The radio resource management functionality plays an important role in new OFDMA based networks. The control of the network resource division among the users is performed by packet scheduling functionality based on maximizing cell coverage and capacity while satisfying certain quality of service constrains. In order to mitigate inter-cell and co-channel interference problems in OFDMA cellular networks, soft frequency reuse with different power mask patterns is used. Stemming from our previous studies in scheduling algorithm developments, we extend the usability of packet scheduling techniques with built in transmit power considerations in the overall priority metrics calculations and scheduling decisions. In this paper, we investigate the system performance of combined soft frequency reuse schemes with advanced power-aware packet scheduling algorithms for further optimization between user fairness and cell throughput. As a concrete example, we demonstrate that by using such technique significant coverage improvements in the order of 30% can be obtained at the expense of only 14% throughput loss. Furthermore, the user fairness is also greatly increased, by more than 18%, when measured using Jain´s fairness index.