A Framework to Evaluate Fairness in Fractional Frequency Reuse Based Cellular Networks

The focus in Mobile communication networks has been addressed to high data rate networks that offer high quality of service. Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) technology has been the first to completely fulfill 4G requirements. However, performance gains remain limited due to severe interference levels. For this reason, the Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) problem is one of the main challenges in LTE-A systems. In order to deal with this ICI problem, in this paper we propose a novel framework to analyze the fairness of several scheduling techniques when Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) schemes are used. We evaluate the system performance of a typical FFR-based LTE-A scenario. Performance results show the optimum values of the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio and partition bandwidth for frequency reuse that maximizes the spectral efficiency. Fairness evaluation has been done in terms of the Gini index, showing a trade-off between spectral efficiency and fairness among users. In that sense, the proposed Truncated-Equal Transmission Rate scheduling policy is able to adjust this trade-off by means of a parameter epsilon.