On the Design of OFDMA-Based FFR-Aided Irregular Cellular Networks With Shadowing

Owing to its high capabilities in terms of spectral efficiency and flexibility, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) has played a crucial role towards the success of 4G cellular systems and an increasing number of actors in the 5G arena strongly advocate for its continuation. OFDMA-based architectures do not introduce intracell interference but, due to the use of very aggressive frequency reuse plans, they must implement some form of inter-cell interference (ICI) control to warrant prescribed levels of quality of service, specially to users located near the cell edge. An efficient technique for mitigating ICI in OFDMA networks is the well-known fractional frequency reuse (FFR) scheme. In FFR, a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio threshold is used to categorize mobile stations (MSs) as cell-center or cell-edge MSs. Furthermore, a different number of frequency resources are allocated to cell-center and cell-edge areas according to a prescribed frequency reuse plan. This paper presents an analytical characterization of FFR-aided OFDMA-based multi-cellular networks that, unlike most previous studies, incorporates shadowing effects and, furthermore, considers that base stations are irregularly deployed. This analytical approach can incorporate different scheduling rules and can underpin different designs for which the optimal FFR parameters can be derived. The proposed framework allows the performance evaluation and optimization of any cell in the system by considering the specific network topology, the user association and categorization processes, the spatial density of users and the characteristics of both the fast multipath fading and the spatially correlated slow shadow fading.