A Fairness-based Performance Evaluation of Fractional Frequency Reuse in LTE

This paper evaluates the downlink performance of Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks employing a metric combining throughput and fairness, which we argue better depicts the effects of FFR. This is as opposed to previous work, which focused on capacitybased metrics, evaluating only the mean, peak (95%), and edge (5%) points of the capacity distribution. We evaluate FFR on a multi-user setup combined with round robin and proportional fair scheduling in a hexagonal grid scenario. We conclude that, compared to traditional scheduling, FFR does not provide tangible gains.