Femtocell Frequency Planning Scheme in Cellular Networks Based on Soft Frequency Reuse

Femtocell is an attractive solution for operators to overcome the indoor coverage problem and to offload the growing traffic within macro cells. However, when femtocells are deployed in the existing macro cell environments, co-channel interference (CCI) may occur between the macro cell and femtocells. This CCI severely degrades the performance of femtocell and macro cell. Therefore, we propose a femtocell frequency allocation method in the macro cell network based on soft frequency reuse (SFR) scheme in downlink. We investigate the performance of macro cell and femtocell according to the power ratio in SFR scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed femtocell deployment does not affect the performance of macro cell users.