Two practical resource allocation techniques for fractional frequency reuse in IEEE 802.16m networks

A practical resource allocation in cellular networks should take into consideration inter-cell information exchange overhead, user channel feedback overhead, and adaptability to network status variations such as user distribution and traffic load. This paper presents two practical resource allocation techniques for the fractional frequency reuse (FFR) operation in IEEE 802.16m networks. Firstly, we propose a power allocation technique where the transmission powers across frequency partitions (FPs) are gradually adapted in a distributed way. The gradual power adaptation is derived from analysis of the optimal power allocation problem. Secondly, base station guided FP selection is proposed to obtain load balanced FP assignment with minimal feedback overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed techniques can enhance the spectral efficiency for the FFR under various network status.