A User Location Distribution Based FFR Strategy for Efficient Utilization of Radio Resources in LTE-A HetNets

Radio resource management (RRM) in a heterogeneous network (HetNet) has gained significant attention in order to manage the radio resources efficiently. In this paper, an adaptive radio resource management (ARRM) strategy is presented to implement the fractional frequency reuse with three sectors and three layers (FFR-3SL) model more efficiently in a conventional long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) HetNet system. In the FFR-3SL model, the entire macro-cell coverage area is split into three sectors and three layers; while the total available bandwidth is fractioned into seven subbands. The radio resources (subbands) are assigned to femto-cells and macro-cells according to the user equipment (UE) demand in high-density areas. In order to examine the model, four different cases of user location distribution (ULD) such as central layer focused (CLF), middle layer focused (MLF), outer layer focused (OLF), and uniform distribution are considered. A Monte Carlo simulation is applied to assess and analyze the overall system performance in terms of throughput and efficiency. The simulation results show that the CLF achieves higher throughput and better efficiency under the given parameters when the ARRM strategy applied properly.