Load-adaptive frequency reuse scheme for inter-cell interference coordination in relay networks

Cellular relay networks adopting orthogonal frequency division multiple (OFDM) technology has been widely accepted for next generation wireless communication due to its advantage in enlarging coverage scale as well as improving data rate. In order to improve the performance of user equipments (UEs) near the cell edge, especially to avoid the interference from inter-cell and intra cell, an enhanced soft frequency reuse scheme is adopted in this paper to assure inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC). Compared with traditional frequency allocation work, the proposed scheme is interference-aware and load-adaptive, which dynamically assigns available frequency among UEs under certain schedule method in variable traffic load condition and mitigates interference using information provided by interference indicator. It can improve signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of the UE in each sub channel thus enable the system achieve better throughput and blocking probability performance. Simulation results prove that the proposed scheme may achieve desirable performance on throughput, blocking probability and spectral utilization in the sector under different traffic load compared with other schemes. © 2010 The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications.