A Hybrid Inter-Cell Interference Mitigation Scheme for an OFDMA Downlink System

A number of inter-cell interference coordination schemes have been proposed to mitigate the inter-cell interference problem for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems and among them, partial frequency reuse is considered one of the most promising approaches. In this paper, we propose an inter-cell interference mitigation scheme for an OFDMA downlink system, which makes use of both partial frequency reuse and soft handover. The basic idea of this hybrid scheme is to dynamically select between a partial frequency reuse scheme and a soft handover scheme to provide better signal quality for cell edge users. Compared with the standard partial frequency reuse scheme, simulation results show that approximately one quarter of cell edge users can get improvements in signal quality as well as link spectral efficiency from using the proposed hybrid scheme. We also observe that by using our approach, there is a significant cell edge throughput gain over the standard partial frequency reuse scheme. Furthermore, based on a well defined data rate fairness criterion, we show that our method achieves higher overall system capacity as compared with the standard partial frequency reuse scheme. key words: OFDMA, inter-cell interference, interference coordination, partial frequency reuse, soft handover