Higher Order Sectorization in FFR-Aided OFDMA Cellular Networks: Spectral- and Energy-Efficiency

It is well known that per macro-site spectral efficiency (SE) can be increased through higher order sectorization (HOS) by radially partitioning the coverage area of each site into multiple sectors and reusing the spectral resources in each sector and across all sites. In order to further reinforce its benefits, HOS can be combined with fractional frequency reuse (FFR) techniques to improve the SE and/or energy efficiency (EE) of the network. This paper presents an analytical framework that is used to assess the sectorization performance in terms of both the SE and EE in the downlink of HOS/FFR-aided orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based macro-cellular networks. Tractable mathematical expressions are derived for the round robin, the proportional fair, and the maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio scheduling rules and the corresponding capacities. The results show the impact of the sectorization gain on the system performance for different cell-edge frequency reuse factor values. Furthermore, an optimization problem for the HOS/FFR-aided OFDMA-based network is addressed, allowing a tradeoff between the EE performance and fairness by suitably dimensioning the FFR inner and outer areas and the corresponding frequency allocation to each of these regions.