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CoSFR: coordinated soft frequency reuse for OFDMA-based multi-cell networks with non-uniform user distribution

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Abstract

Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) technology has been extensively studied to improve service quality of users near cell boundaries. Most ICIC schemes available make an assumption that users in the same cell are distributed uniformly. This is reasonable but incomplete. Mobility may result in users distributed non-uniformly, so this paper proposes a novel semi-static ICIC scheme, coordinated soft frequency reuse (CoSFR), for multi-cell networks with non-uniform user distribution. A finer cell partition structure with a tunable parameter r is proposed. With this structure, dedicated user classification rules and opportunistic scheduling strategies are designed for different cells. Assisted by a simple but efficient coordination scheme, a cell with overloaded cell-edge traffic, named aggressor cell, calls adjacent neighboring cells for help. Some reuse opportunities can be created after coordination and the aggressor cell can expand its cell-edge band to alleviate the overloaded state. No additional entity is required for being compatible with the flat network structure of LTE/LTE-Advanced. In addition, CoSFR can deal with the scenario that more than one cell suffering overloaded cell-edge traffic and it can also be applied to irregular cells with minimal modifications. Simulation results show that more than 97.4 % users are satisfied with their data rate. Average cell-edge user throughput is raised substantially and the outage probability declines significantly.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we will use the notions subchannel and PRB interchangeably.

  2. User position information can be collected by GPS or other positioning systems. These information can be transmitted via the physical uplink control channel (PUCCH) defined in LTE.

  3. Without misunderstanding, we omit the superscript k for simplicity.

  4. It deserves noting that users may have different demands.

  5. Additionally, we provide the list of used symbols in this section and onward in Table 1.

  6. We assume there is only one aggressor cell here. The more complex scenario will be discussed later on.

  7. We cannot provide the solution to the optimization problem since it is not solvable in such a large scale network within a reasonable time using regular devices available.

  8. When the aggressor cells are also direct neighbors, the system should turn to other load balance technologies for help.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61231008), and by the 111 Project under Grant (B08038).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Broadband Wireless Communications Laboratory, Information Science Institute, State Key Laboratory of Integrated Service Networks, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China

    Jinjing Huang, Jiandong Li, Linjing Zhao & Sheng Huang

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  1. Jinjing Huang
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  2. Jiandong Li
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Correspondence to Jiandong Li.

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Huang, J., Li, J., Zhao, L. et al. CoSFR: coordinated soft frequency reuse for OFDMA-based multi-cell networks with non-uniform user distribution. Wireless Netw 23, 2037–2050 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-016-1247-6

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