Performance enhancement based resource allocation scheme using soft frequency reuse for LTE femtocell networks

Femtocells have considered as a key technology in long term evolution (LTE) networks to fulfill high data rate demand which offload indoor traffic from outdoor traffic. However, co-channel interference is a critical issue that may significantly decrease the performance of femtocell and macro cells. In this paper, a resource allocation scheme for LTE femtocell networks using a soft frequency Reuse Scheme (SFR) is proposed to improve the throughput and fairness performance. In addition, the proposed resource allocation scheme investigates the optimal cell design parameter such as, inner cell radius and power ratio between outer and inner regions of macro cell that maximize the total cell throughput, minimize interference and obtain a good degree of fairness between users. The performance of the proposed scheme is valued and compared with different frequency reuse schemes (i.e., reuse-1, reuse-3 and FFR) using MATLAB simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves femtocell throughput and consequently total cell throughput and achieve higher degree of fairness between users.