Enhanced frequency reuse schemes for interference management in LTE femtocell networks

Abstract

Femtocells are low power access points that can be deployed by the consumer indoors to alleviate cellular coverage problems, offload traffic from the cellular network and boost user data rates. To enable the widespread of femtocells coexisting with macrocells, smart interference management schemes are required. Interference management by frequency allocation is still a big challenge in hybrid macro/femto cellular networks. Arbitrary frequency allocation schemes may have detrimental effects on the overall system spectral efficiency and coverage. In this paper, we propose soft and partial frequency reuse schemes for interference management in LTE femtocell networks. We analyze the system performance with various frequency allocation schemes via different metrics such as throughput, quality of service (QoS) and fairness. Simulation results show that the pro-posed soft frequency reuse (SFR) scheme with an optimized interior region radius provides an acceptable tradeoff compared to other allocation schemes.