Throughput and optimal threshold for FFR schemes in OFDMA cellular networks

Fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is an efficient way to mitigate inter-cell interference (ICI) in multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. In this paper, we investigate the throughput and the optimal threshold for the FFR scheme. The average cell throughputs are derived for both round robin (RR) and maximum SINR (MSINR) scheduling strategies when users are uniformly distributed in the cell region. It is shown from the analysis and simulation results that the throughput increases and the optimal distance threshold decreases with the number of users for both scheduling strategies. The optimal distance threshold approaches the minimum distance that users can be away from the base station when the number of users goes to infinity. The optimal distance threshold increases with the frequency reuse factor of the cell-edge region when the MSINR scheduling is used. The impact of the RR scheduling strategy on the optimal threshold of the FFR scheme is negligible. Simulation also demonstrates that the FFR scheme with the optimal threshold significantly outperforms that with the existing fixed threshold.