Comparison of Fractional Frequency Reuse and Soft Frequency Reuse for Interference Management

Abstract:
Frequency allocation is an important issue in wireless communication systems. And frequency reuse is an effective solution to it. In this paper, 3 typical schemes for frequency reuse are introduced, which are the basic integer frequency reuse (IFR) scheme, strict fractional frequency reuse (FFR) scheme and soft frequency reuse (SFR) scheme. IFR was the most original idea of frequency multiplexing. Then FFR and SFR appeared one after another. And now SFR is still a vital scheme for frequency allocation in LTE systems. To have a more detailed comparison of them, computer simulations are conducted in this paper and their performances are assessed by the signal-to-interference-with-noise ratio (SINR), average sum rate of the network, and the outage probability. From the result, it can be found that the SFR network has a greater average sum rate and smaller outage probability generally, and it has a better distribution of SINR among users compared with those in the IFR network and FFR network, which indicates SFR has a better performance among these 3 schemes. This paper has a basic comparison between these 3 schemes that can provide reference data and make the basis of frequency allocation solid.