Interference Aware Scheduling for Soft Frequency Reuse

In this paper we present an interference aware phased scheduling strategy for a soft frequency reuse (SFR) interference coordination scheme in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) network. It groups the active user terminals (UT) in a low and high signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) group and picks UTs from both groups in each scheduling round to optimally exploit the interference variations introduced by SFR. We show that the proposed interference aware phased scheduling scheme for SFR improves the 5 percentile of the user throughput cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the average cell throughput compared to reuse one. In addition to better performance the reduced feedback option of the proposed phased scheduler reduces the feedback load by two third for UTs in the low SINR group with a moderate decrease in the 5 percentile of the user throughput CDF while keeping the same average cell throughput. Further, our system simulation results show that SFR clearly outperforms fractional frequency reuse, a competing interference coordination scheme.