Joint Optimization of Fractional Frequency Reuse and Cell Clustering for Dynamic TDD Small Cell Networks

In dense small cell networks, dynamic time-division duplex (D-TDD) technology has emerged as a promising solution to accommodate the fast variants of volatile traffic conditions because it allows each cell to dynamically configure the uplink and downlink transmission directions. However, the flexibility of traffic configuration introduces additional inter-cell interference, which largely deteriorates network throughput. This paper proposes an interference coordination technology for D-TDD small cell networks by integrating fractional frequency reuse (FFR) with cell clustering. To evaluate the system performance, we develop a theoretical framework to analytically characterize the mean packet throughput (MPT) performance by considering the impact of spatio-temporal traffic. The analytical model can be extended to further study the FFR-based D-TDD, clustered D-TDD, and traditional D-TDD networks. We verify the accuracy of our analysis through simulations and whereby explore the effect of different network parameters. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms clustered D-TDD and traditional D-TDD for both the downlink and uplink spatially averaged MPT, and can significantly improve the performance in uplink while slightly decreasing that in downlink compared with FFR-based D-TDD. Furthermore, by jointly optimizing network parameters, the spatially averaged MPT can be maximized while enduring MPT per user.