Adaptive soft frequency reuse scheme for in-building dense femtocell networks

Femtocell networks have emerged as a key technology in residential, office building or hotspot deployments that can significantly fulfill high data demands in order to offload indoor traffic from outdoor macro cells. However, as one of the major challenges, inter-femtocell interference gets worse in 3D in-building scenarios because of the presence of numerous interfering sources and then needs to be considered in the early network planning phase. The indoor network planning and optimization tool suite, Ranplan Small-cell®, makes accurate prediction of indoor wireless RF signal propagation possible to guide actual indoor femtocell deployments. In this paper, a new adaptive soft frequency reuse scheme in the dense femtocell networks is proposed, where multiple dense femtocells are classified into a number of groups according to the dominant interference strength to others, then the minimum subchannels with different frequency reuse factors for these groups are determined and transmit powers of the grouping sub-channels are adaptively adjusted based on the strength to mitigate the mutual interference. Simulation results show the proposed scheme yields great performance gains in terms of the spectrum efficiency relative to the legacy soft frequency reuse and universal frequency reuse.