Interference constrained soft frequency reuse for uplink ICIC in LTE networks

Careful management of inter-cell interference is important in OFDMA based systems such as LTE. In this paper, we study an uplink ICIC (Inter-cell Interference Coordination) mechanism, which fully utilizes the flexibility of frequency selective scheduling and rate adaptation, while dynamically limiting the interference experienced by the neighboring cells. This technique can be seen as an extension of soft frequency reuse SFR, which has been widely studied for the downlink. The proposed technique provides a flexible and efficient way of sharing resources between the cell-edge and cell-center users, without the need to strictly classify each UE into one of these categories. It avoids the loss of trunking efficiency inherent in static classification of users according to their geographical location within the serving cell. We analyze the proposed method, and evaluate its performance using system level simulations. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of our method.