Optimization of Soft Frequency Reuse for Irregular LTE Macrocellular Networks

Interference management has been recognized by the industry as a key enabler for 4G systems. Emerging technologies include multicarrier systems such as LTE and WiMAX for which effective management of intercell interference is of utmost importance in order to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) at cell edges. Static Intercell Interference Coordination (ICIC) techniques such as Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR) are aimed at alleviating this problem; however the usage of baseline SFR designs (schemes without optimization) only offers tradeoffs between cell edge performance and spectral efficiency and performance is indeed far from optimal as results herein confirm. Thus, this paper presents a novel multiobjective algorithm in order to address this problem and achieve effective optimization of SFR implementations. Results show that the proposed algorithm succeeds in finding good-quality SFR configurations enhancing simultaneously network capacity and cell edge performance while reducing energy consumption with respect to baseline designs and previous proposals.