Load balancing combining fractional frequency reuse with unrestricted user association

Maximizing system throughput and bandwidth utilization while guaranteeing fairness among users is a core technical challenge in the design of next generation cellular networks. In this context, fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is a helpful tool if it is flexible in terms of resource and power allocation as well as scheduling. Complementary to this tool, a well-chosen association of users to base station sectors can yet be another important factor, particularly when users are distributed unevenly in space. Here we propose a load balancing scheme that combines flexible FFR with an unrestricted association of users to sectors or base stations, thereby effectively increasing the user data rates in the dense regions of the network. In a first step, we perform virtual joint power allocation and scheduling so as to determine the best sectors for maximizing the throughput for a given user. In a second step, users are actually associated to the best sectors, which are not necessarily the ones providing the strongest signal. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism provides fairness by load balancing while still maintaining the throughput over all users.