Optimal power masking in soft frequency reuse based OFDMA networks

Soft frequency reuse is a strong tool for co-channel interference mitigation in cellular OFDMA/LTE networks. The performance of such networks significantly depends on the configuration of the power masks that implement the soft frequency reuse patterns. In this paper, we investigate the performance of different power mask configurations against the optimal case, in which a central entity optimally distributes power and resource blocks among the users of the network. It is shown that large differences exist between the performance of different mask types and the optimal case in both, the overall cell throughput, as well as the cell-edge user performance.