Interference mitigation in heterogeneous networks using Fractional Frequency Reuse

Femtocells are the rising new technology aiming to enhance the indoor coverage for Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced networks. However, the interference between the macrocells and femtocells can be a huge obstacle against deploying the femtocells on a large scale. In this paper, two Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) deployment schemes (FFR-3 and FFR-6) are being evaluated for heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Moreover, a new scheme is proposed aiming to minimize the interference on the macro-user (MU) in the cell center. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the outage probability and improves the throughput of the whole network. Furthermore, in the proposed scheme, higher percentages of users are using higher order modulation which improves the total throughput.