Analysis of decoupled association in HetNets using soft frequency reuse scheme

Abstract Meeting the huge data demands of cellular networks requires an integrated model in terms of interference mitigation technique and cell association scheme. A heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet), which comprises low power small base stations (sBSs) deployed in the coverage of high power macro base station (mBS), plays a vital role in achieving high network performance gains. Large transmit power discrepancy among various tiers of HetNet with maximum received power association scheme results in fewer number of users associated with sBSs causing inefficient utilization of resources. A fraction of users from mBS are offloaded to sBSs for performance improvements, which causes signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio degradation due to strong mBS interference. Therefore, proactive user association along with interference management technique is essential to abate interference with efficient use of sBSs' resources. In this paper, we consider soft frequency reuse scheme together with decoupled association (DA) to mitigate interference and to achieve load balancing. Results indicate that the proposed unified model achieves enhanced coverage probability due to reduced interference and DA outperforms all other methods used in the state-of-the-art.