Adaptive Soft Frequency Reuse for Inter-Cell Interference Coordination in SC-FDMA Based 3GPP LTE Uplinks

This paper proposes a decentralized adaptive soft frequency reuse scheme for the uplink of 4G long-term evolution (LTE) systems. While universal frequency reuse (UFR) is being targeted for next generation multi-cellular wireless networks, ongoing efforts supporting the LTE standard have proved that actual implementations of UFR in LTE lead to unacceptable interference levels experienced by user equipments near the cell edge area in a multi-cellular configuration. The herein proposed adaptive soft frequency reuse scheme is a step forward towards effective inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) in next-generation wireless networks. Our solution to the uplink ICIC problem stands out for its two essential features that consist of physical resource block (PRB) reuse avoidance/minimization and cell-edge bandwidth breathing which can be implemented at the cost of a negligible information exchange over the X2 interface (backbone). The PRB reuse avoidance feature significantly decreases inter-cell interference levels while improving the achievable average throughput per user, especially for those identified as cell-edge ones. The cell-edge bandwidth breathing strategy allows to track and adapt to semi-static changes in traffic loading and user distributions within each cell which drastically reduces the blocking probability of incoming calls under cell-edge bandwidth constrained traffic.