In-Cabin Downlink Cell Planning with Fractional Frequency Reuse

Due to the growing demand for ubiquitous Internet access, airlines are seeking profitable solutions for providing wireless services for aircraft passengers. Furthermore, novel Inflight Entertainment (IFE) services targeted at mobile phones are already steering rising in-cabin wireless capacity demands. In certain deployments, one mobile cell may not provide sufficient capacity to accommodate the high capacity demand. Therefore, multi-cell schemes may have to be deployed inside of the aircraft. In this way the achievable user throughput can be increased and the spectral occupation minimized (specially when flying above foreign lands with diverse spectrum policies). In order to optimize the SINR of multi-cell deployments within aircraft, this paper proposes a wireless topology based on Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR). It is then shown that this approach can increase the cell-edge SINR in approximately 6 dB with respect to a multi-cell deployment lacking FFR.