A Unified Framework for the Analysis of Fractional Frequency Reuse Techniques

Fractional frequency reuse (FFR) and soft frequency reuse (SFR) systems are an efficient cellular interference management technique to reduce inter-cell interference in multi-cell OFDMA networks. In this paper, a new and unified analytical framework for performance evaluation for both systems over a composite fading environment is presented. Explicit expressions are obtained for the area spectral efficiency (ASE) with both FFR and SFR, under fully loaded and partially loaded systems for downlink and uplink, and in generalized frequency reuse factor. The presented numerical result provides useful system design guidelines between the two systems. It is demonstrated that SFR outperforms FFR in a partially loaded scenario while the opposite is true for fully loaded system. The mathematical model is then extended to include the analysis of elastic data traffic in FFR system.