Hybrid femtocell resource allocation strategy in fractional frequency reuse

Heterogeneous networks consisting of small cells (e.g. femtocells) are capable of achieving high capacity and improving indoor cellular coverage area, while the fractional frequency reuse (FFR) scheme has been proposed for upcoming and future cellular systems to improve spectral efficiency in cellular OFDM networks. In two-tier networks of macrocells layered with femtocells, the resource allocation will most likely be sharing the same licensed spectrum. In this paper, we formulate a simple femtocells resource allocation strategies that allows a femtocells base station (FBS) to allocate more resources (co-channel) in high usage areas such as commercial FBS (cFBS) and orthogonal resource allocation for randomly deployed home user FBS (hFBS). We analyze our strategy in a multi-cell systems using area spectral efficiency (ASE) in composite fading consisting of Nakagami-m fading, path-loss and log-normal shadowing. Analytical and simulation results show that our simple resource allocation strategies are able to reduce inter-tier interferences and to offer an improvement in the overall spectral efficiency of the two-tier systems.