A New Fractional Frequency Reuse Method for Interference Management in LTE-A HetNets

Co-Channel interference appears a significant challenge in LTE-A heterogeneous networks (HetNets), which degrades the overall performance of the system. Therefore, an adequate interference management strategy is necessary to implement the HetNets properly. In this study, a new Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) method is proposed, where the whole coverage area of a macrocell is partitioned into three sectors and three layers. Moreover, the proposed FFR method divides the total bandwidth into seven subbands. Macrocells and femtocells efficiently utilize these subbands in different regions. The Monte Carlo simulation is run, to evaluate and examine the system in terms of throughput. The simulation results show that the proposed method achieves higher throughput and improves the overall performance of the LTE-A HetNet system when compared with the existing FFR methods.