Characterizing and optimizing the throughput of FFR/SFR-aided OFDMA networks

OFDMA-based multi-cellular standards incorporate interference coordination techniques that allow near universal frequency reuse while preserving reasonably high spectral efficiencies. In particular, frequency reuse approaches are employed to mitigate the inter-cell interference and thereby enhancing cell-edge users performance. Two representative strategies are fractional frequency reuse (FFR) and soft frequency reuse (SFR), which are deemed to play a key role in the next generation of cellular networks. This paper introduces an analytical framework allowing the analytical evaluation of performance metrics such as the spectral efficiency or user throughput CDF in the context of FFR/SFR-aided OFDMA networks. Remarkably, the proposed analytical framework is used to design optimal schemes by suitably dimensioning the inner and outer cellular areas, the frequency allocation to each of these regions and the corresponding transmit power. The performance evaluation results combine metrics such as spectral efficiency and the 5th-percentile of users rate in order to characterize and optimize the performance of FFR/SFR-aided OFDMA networks.