Fractional Reuse for LTE-Advanced

Interference is a major source of performance degradation in wireless networks, which motivates to actively manage inter-cell interference in a multi-cell environment. Contrary to approaches that build on centralized coordination of the transmission strategies, we consider a rather weak form of transmitter cooperation based on fractional reuse. While in many existing wireless networks the design of frequency reuse is done in the network planning phase, we consider a scheme that allocates resources during runtime and thereby is able to dynamically adjust to the current user distributions and service requirements. Such dynamic resource allocation becomes especially challenging in case advanced multi-user (MU) strategies, such as MU-MIMO are considered. Having a rather theoretic framework at hand [1], the main contribution of this work is an adaption to the LTE-A system. We present practical solutions to several idealized assumptions made in the original work, thereby making a first step from theoretical research to practical solutions relevant for standards. By numerical simulations with an LTE-A systemlevel simulator, we are able to show significant performance gains, especially for cell-edge users.