Interference management using frequency planning in an OFDMA based wireless network

In next generation broadband wireless networks, the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technique provides a flexible physical interface for mobile users (MS) to share the radio resources. Since OFDMA allows MSs in different cells to reuse the same frequency subchannels to increase network spectrum utilization, MSs at the edge of a cell suffer from severe inter-cell interference from co-channel MSs in the neighboring cells. In WiMAX and LTE networks, fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is employed to mitigate the interference for edge users, but may incur a cost in terms of a lower overall spectrum utilization. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency planning scheme to improve the signal-to-interference (SIR) ratio of edge MSs in a multi-cell OFDMA system. A cell is partitioned in a way that minimizes the interference to the edge areas while sustaining a full frequency reuse factor (FRF) for each cell. Simulation results show that our scheme substantially outperforms FFR methods in terms of SIR under the condition of full frequency reuse and high traffic load.