Fractional Frequency Reuse in LTE Networks
Husam Eldin Elmutasim Osman Mohamed Elfadil, Mohammed Adil Ibrahim Ali, Mohammed Abas
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Khartoum
Khartoum, Sudan
Abstract— 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a standard
for wireless communications to achieve high spectral efficiency,
high peak data rates, as well as flexibility in frequency and
bandwidth. By using frequency reuse of one in LTE networks,
high spectral efficiency is achieved. However, the Inter-Cell
Interference (ICI) resulted from the frequency reuse of one is a
main limitation in these networks. Fractional Frequency Reuse
(FFR) has been proposed as an Inter-Cell Interference
Coordination (ICIC) technique in Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based LTE networks. FFR
divides the cell into an inner and an outer region, and then
different frequency reuse factors are applied in each region in
such a way the interference is reduced. This paper focuses on
evaluating two FFR deployment schemes, namely, Strict FFR and
Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR) and compares them with the
conventional frequency reuse scheme. A broad comparison
among all these frequency reuse schemes is performed by using a
proposed mechanism which depends on Monte Carlo simulations
considering performance metrics such as Signal to Interference
plus Noise Ratio (SINR), capacity and throughput. Simulation
results show that, the higher SINR achieved by Strict FFR is not
reflected in terms of throughput due to the small bandwidth
utilization, and Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR) can provide higher
cell-edge throughput by increasing the power control factor but
this comes at the cost of decreased inner region throughput.
Keywords—fractional frequency reuse (FFR); inter-cell
interference coordination (ICIC); orthogonal frequency-division
multiple access (OFDMA); long term evolutin (LTE)
I. INTRODUCTION
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the next major step in
mobile radio communications, and was introduced in 3GPP
Release 8. LTE uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple
Access (OFDMA) as its radio access technology, together
with advanced antenna technologies [1].
The scarcity of bandwidth, spectrum and power in wireless
systems has driven the need for spectrally efficient
communication systems. In a cellular communication system
such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), the Inter-Cell
Interference (ICI) is one of the main factors that influences the
data rates of the users at the cell-edge and affects the average
spectral efficiency of the cell.
When the frequencies of downlink transmission between
neighboring cells are different, like in the conventional
cellular systems, then the inter-cell interference will be a
minor problem. This type of frequency reuse is common in
older generation of wireless networks as it improves the Signal
to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR). But the bandwidth
available to reuse these frequencies is lower than the
equivalent gain achieved with this SINR improvement [2].
Hence, conventional cellular systems suffer from poor
spectral efficiency through high reuse factors. With a
frequency reuse factor of one, as in LTE-Release 8, higher
spectral efficiency is achieved since all the bandwidth is
allocated in each cell. However, there will be greater
interference between neighboring cells, especially at the cell-
edge, which reduces the SINR for cell-edge users [3].
Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) is a strategy to
improve the performance of the network by having each cell
allocate its resources such that interference experienced in the
network is minimized, while maximizing spatial reuse[3].
Fractional frequency reuse (FFR) has been proposed as an
ICIC technique in OFDMA based wireless networks [4]. The
basic idea of FFR is to partition the cell’s bandwidth so that (i)
cell-edge users of adjacent cells do not interfere with each
other and (ii) interference received by (and created by) cell-
interior users is reduced, while (iii) using more total spectrum
than conventional frequency reuse. In FFR the cell space is
divided into two regions: inner, which is close to the Base
Station (BS) and outer, which is situated to the borders of the
cell. The whole frequency band is divided into several sub-
bands, and each sub-band is assigned either to the inner or the
outer region of the cell [4].
There are two common FFR deployment modes: Strict FFR
and Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR). While FFR can be considered
in the uplink or downlink, this paper focuses on the downlink
since it typically supports links with greater rate requirements
with a low margin for interference and additionally we can,
unlike the uplink, neglect power control by assuming equal
power downlinks [4].
1) Strict FFR: Strict FFR is a modification of the traditional
frequency reuse used extensively in multi-cell networks [6],
[7]. Fig. 1 illustrates Strict FFR for a hexagonal grid modeled
deployment with a cell-edge reuse factor of RF=3. Users in
each cell-interior are allocated a common sub-band of
frequencies while cell-edge users’ bandwidth is partitioned
across cells based on a reuse factor of RF. In total, Strict FFR
thus requires a total of RF + 1 sub-band. Interior users do not
share any spectrum with exterior users, which reduce
interference for both interior users and cell-edge users [4].

Fig. 1. Strict FFR.
2) Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR): Fig. 2 illustrates a SFR
deployment with a reuse factor of RF = 3 on the cell-edge. SFR
employs the same cell-edge bandwidth partitioning strategy as
Strict FFR, but the interior users are allowed to share sub-bands
with edge users in other cells. Because cell-interior users share
the bandwidth with neighboring cells, they typically transmit at
lower power levels than the cell-edge users [8], [9]. While SFR
is more bandwidth efficient than Strict FFR, it results in more
interference to both cell-interior and edge users [10], [4].
Fig. 2. Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR).
II. SYSTEM MODEL
In this section we describe the theoretical approach to
calculate the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR),
capacity and throughput. We assume that the overall network is
composed of M adjacent cells. Each cell contains K users
seeking to share N subcarriers. Users are distributed randomly
inside the cell. We distinguish the case where a user is found in
the inner or in the outer region of the cell. In a typical OFDMA
cellular network, for a user x who is served by a base station b
on subcarrier n, the related SINR is given by the following
equation [11]:
√ ( )
(1)
∑ √ ( )
The set represents all the interfering base stations, i.e.
base stations that are using the same sub-band as user . The
shadow fading is a random variable described by a log-
normal distribution, ( ) The path loss follows
the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) model, ( )
( ), where is the distance [12].
In (1), refers to the distance between user x and base
station b, is the path loss exponent, is the transmit power
of the base station b on subcarrier n, is the small-scale
Rayleigh Fading which is i.i.d. complex Gaussian value
according to ( ), and is the noise power of the
Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. Symbols k
and j refer to the set of all the interfering BSs (i.e. BSs that are
using the same sub-band as user x). In detail, j is the cell index
and k is the number of co-channel cells.
The interference that occurs comes from disjoint sets of
downlinks in the inner and outer region. A transmission in an
inner region that is assigned specific frequency band causes
interference only to inner users of other cells that are assigned
the same band. Furthermore, it is necessary to distinguish two
categories of BSs. The first consists of all interfering BSs
transmitting to inner region users on the same sub-band as user
x and the second consists of all interfering BSs transmitting to
cell-edge users on the same sub-band as user x [5].
In our analysis, in the case of Conventional Frequency
Reuse and Strict FFR, we assume that equal transmit power is
applied, for all BSs.
In the case of SFR inter-cell interference no longer comes
from disjoint sets of interior and exterior downlinks, but can
come from either set, and coarse power control is typical. To
accomplish this, a power control factor is introduced to
the transmit power to create two different classes,
, , where is the transmit power
of the base station if user x is an interior user and is the
transmit power of the base station if user x is a cell-edge user.
The interfering base stations are also separated into two
classes: , which consists of all interfering base stations
transmitting to cell interior users on the same sub-band as user
x (at power ) and , which consists of all interfering
base stations transmitting to cell-edge users on the same sub-
band as user y (at power ). For an inner user, the
resulting SINR expression is given as [13]
√ ( )
(2)
Where ∑ √ ( )
∑ √ ( )
And for a cell-edge user
√ ( ) (3)
After the SINR estimation, we proceed with the throughput
calculation. The spectral efficiency in bps/Hz of user x on
subcarrier n, can be calculated by the Shannon's formula
[14]:
 ( ) (4)
Moreover, the throughput in bps of the user x can be
expressed as follows:
∑ (5)
Where is the available bandwidth for each subcarrier,
and represents the subcarrier assigned to user x. When
the subcarrier n is assigned to user x. Otherwise,
. spectral efficiency is then calculated from Shannon's formula.
One of the most important FFR system design parameters is
the inner region radius , which determines the size of the
frequency partitions. Additionally, since the cell partitions are
based on the geometry of the network, knowledge of user
locations is important. One practical method to determine user
classifications is for each cell to use the average received
(SINR) of its users, which is usually a good indicator of the
distance of the user from its base station. The base station then
classifies users with average SINR less than a pre-determined
threshold as edge users, while users with average SINR greater
than the threshold are classified as interior users.
For both FFR systems, the resource allocation between
interior and cell-edge users is proportional to the square of the
ratio of the interior radius and the cell radius R. This is optimal
when user locations are assumed to be uniformly distributed
[15]. For Strict FFR, with total subcarriers available to
the cell, the allocation of subcarriers for interior users
and exterior users is given as [13]
[ ( ) ] (6)
( )⁄ (7)
For SFR the allocation of sub-bands is given as
[ ( ) ] (8)
([ ] ) (9)
III. MECHANISM OVERVIEW
In this section, we propose a mechanism for evaluating the
three types of frequency reuse schemes under consideration,
namely, conventional frequency resue, Strict FFR and SFR.
The goal of the mechanism is to produce average per-user
SINR, average per-user spectral efficiency and average per-
user throughput as functions of distance from Base Station for
each frequency reuse scheme, as well as the CDFs of the
mentioned parameters.
The proposed mechanism assumes a topology that consists
of a grid of M cells and K users that are randomly distributed in
each cell. In case of conventional frequency reuse the whole
bandwidth is used in the cell with frequency reuse 1.
Otherwise, the mechanism divides each cell in an inner region
and an outer region. For Strict FFR and SFR, bandwidth
division is done as described in Section II.
Inner region radius is chosen to be equal to two-thirds of
the radius ( ( ) ) where is the total cell radius.
For each user the mechanism calculates user's SINR
according to each frequency reuse scheme, and this calculation
is done for 300 Monte Carlo realizations in order to average the
fading and shadowing values.
Each user's SINR is then mapped to its corresponding CQI
entity [16], in order to determine the modulation scheme which
tells us the number of bits per symbol used by this user. The
Subcarrier allocation is the main part of an OFDMA RRM
algorithm. Here, the algorithm decides first the number of
subcarriers that must be allocated to a user and then the specific
channels from the set of available subcarriers. Subcarrier
allocation is executed exclusively for a new user asking
admission. Re-allocation of all OFDM subcarriers within a cell,
although it is able to exploit multi-user diversity as shown at
[17],[18], increases algorithmic complexity and time for
decision making.
Subcarrier allocation is divided into two steps. First, the
algorithm determines the number of subcarriers per user. The
subcarrier is loaded with b bits/symbol according to the
modulation level. Assuming that a user asks for a bit rate
bps, when the subcarrier spacing is Hz the number of
subcarriers that should be allocated to this user is,
(10)
Then, the subcarrier allocation algorithm decides which
specific subcarriers to assign to the new user. We use random
subcarrier allocation algorithm which is a well-known
subcarrier allocation technique, widely used in 2G wireless
networks in order to average co-channel interference [18]. The
following shows that the algorithm randomly selects
subcarriers from the set of available subcarriers and allocates
them to the user .
1: ← ( )
2: Allocate subcarriers to user
3: ←
where ( ) randomly selects elements from the
set .
Since we are working under the assumption that subcarriers
are identical, it does not matter which subcarriers are allocated
to the user. Therefore, we are only concerned about the number
of subcarriers allocated to each user.
Each user randomly requests one of the service classes (64,
128, 256, 512 or 1024 kbps), then the corresponding number of
requested subcarriers is calculated. Moreover, we calculate the
number of subcarriers that corresponds to the minimum service
class for that user.
In case of remaining unassigned subcarriers, the excess
subcarriers will be assigned to the users in round robin manner.
On the other hand, if the number of the available subcarriers is
less than the number of the total requested subcarriers, the
mechanism will subtract subcarriers in round robin manner
until the number of the assigned subcarriers is equal to the
available subcarriers. The situation where the available
subcarriers are less than the minimum number of subcarriers
needed by the user is assumed to not exist.
Once subcarriers are allocated to each user, the
corresponding throughput is determined. We repeat the
mechanism for 1000 Monte Carlo simulations. Then the
average per-user SINR, average per-user spectral and average
per-user throughput are plotted as functions of average per-user
distance from Base Station, as well as their CDFs for all
frequency reuse schemes.
Strict FFR, SFR with different power control factor values
( ) and the conventional method are examined.
The simulation parameters that are necessary for the
conduction of the experiment are presented in Table I. The
network is composed of 19 cells, and 24 users randomly
distributed in each cell. Since we examine an LTE-based
cellular environment all the performance requirements, link
and system simulation parameters (BS transmit power, Power
Noise Density, Cell radius) are in accordance with the 3GPP
specifications [16]. In detail, we consider a system with
20MHz of bandwidth (i.e. LTE) divided into 1200 subcarriers
of 15 KHz each [21]. The scenario assumed is urban macro,
which exists in dense urban areas, served by macro cells BS of
2,000 MHz frequency.

Initialization of Simulation
Parameters
SINR values calculation and the
averaging og these values

Subcarrier Allocation
Spectral Efficiency and
Throughput calculation
Averaging data and plotting the
results
Fig. 3. Flow diagram of the implemented FFR program code
A general flow diagram of the FFR program code is
presented as shown in Fig. 3. It describes the main parts of the
program code and the steps that the program code performs in
order to obtain the final results. It is important to notice that
this is only a general flow diagram and it does not include all
the parts and functions in the actual program code implemented
in MATLAB, it only gives a broad idea about the sequence in
which the program code operates. The written MATLAB file
can be found on [20].
IV. RESULTS
TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS
Fig. 4. Average per-user SINR as function of average per-user distance from
the BS for different frequency reuse schemes.
Fig. 4 shows average per-user SINR as function of average
per-user distance from the BS for different frequency reuse
schemes. The conventional method and Strict FFR have similar
SINR trend in the inner region since each user will be applied
to the same transmit and interference powers, and both achieve
best SINR performance in the inner region. However, in the
outer region (cell-edge), where users in Strict FFR suffer from
less interference than the conventional method, the former has
a better performance than the latter. SFR with along
with the conventional method have the worst performance in
the cell-edge. For SFR, as we increasing the power control
factor, we can clearly notice that SINR performance is
increasing in the cell-edge because of the increased signal
power. However, as the power control factor is increasing, the
users in the inner are exposed to greater interference and ,
eventually, we see a considerable decrease in SINR in the inner
region. Since path loss is proportional to the distance from the
BS, the SINR, in general, is declining as we go farther from
BS.

Parameter Value
Network size 19 cells
Users per cell 24
System bandwidth 20 MHz
Subcarriers 1200
Subcarriers' bandwidth 15 KHz
Cell radius 250 m
Carrier frequency 2,000 MHz
BS transmit power 46 dBm
Noise power spectral density -174 dBm/Hz
Fig. 5. Average per-user Spectral Efficiency as function of average per-user
distance from the BS for different frequency reuse schemes.
 Fig. 5 shows the average per-user spectral efficiency as
function average per-user distance from the BS for different
frequency reuse schemes. Since the spectral efficiency is
proportional to the SINR (see Shannon's Formula), similar
trends to that observed in SINR for different frequency reuse
schemes occur here.
Fig. 6. Average per-user Throughput as function of average per-user distance
from the BS for different frequency reuse schemes.
Fig. 6 shows the average per-user throughput as function
average per-user distance from the BS for different frequency
reuse schemes. It can be clearly seen that conventional
frequency reuse has the highest throughput in the inner region,
and lowest throughput in the cell-edge. For the outer region,
SFR with β=8 has the highest cell-edge throughput. And
obviously for less values of power control factor, less cell-edge
throughput is observed. However, although Strict FFR has the
best SINR performance in the cell-edge, this is not reflected in
terms of throughput. This is due to the fact that Strict FFR has
less number of subcarriers allocated in each cell especially in
the cell-edge. On the other hand, SFR has much better
bandwidth utilization. Since the throughput is linearly
proportional to the bandwidth, and logarithmically proportional
to the SINR, a decrease in the former will surpass an increase
in the later. Therefore, Strict FFR has less throughput
performance especially in the outer region compared to SFR in
spite of its superiority in terms of SINR. Yet the throughput is
decreasing as we increase the distance from the BS, because of
the increase amount of path loss.
Although both conventional frequency and SFR have large
bandwidth utilization, the conventional frequency performs the
better in the inner region while SFR is worse especially for
increased power control factors. In contrast, the increased
power control factors give higher cell-edge throughputs while
the conventional method has worse values.
Fig. 7. CDF of average per-user SINR values for different frequency reuse
schemes.
Fig. 7 shows CDF of average per-user SINR values for
different frequency reuse schemes. The reason behind using
CDFs is to show the overall performance of different frequency
reuse schemes in spite of the region which the user belongs to.
It can be clearly seen that Strict FFR has the best SINR
performance because of the less amount of interference facing
the cell-edge users. Strict FFR is followed closely by
conventional frequency reuse and SFR with
respectively. SFRs with increased power control factor have
worse SINR performance.
Fig. 8. CDF of average per-user Spectral Efficiency values for different
frequency reuse schemes.
Fig. 8 shows CDF of average per-user spectral efficiency
for different frequency reuse schemes. Since the spectral
efficiency is proportional to the SINR (see Shannon's
Formula), similar trends to that observed in SINR for different
frequency reuse schemes occur here.
Fig. 9. CDF of average per-user Throughput values for different frequency
reuse schemes.
Fig. 9 shows CDF of average per-user throughput for
different frequency reuse schemes. We can say that
conventional frequency reuse has the best performance (except
for throughput values less than 0.25 Mbps where Strict FFR
performs better) with a considerable difference from the other
methods followed by Strict FFR and SFR. As mentioned
earlier, although Strict FFR has the best SINR performance, it
cannot have the best throughput performance since the amount
of Strict FFR's allocated subcarriers per-cell is less than SFR's
and the conventional method. The logarithmic increase caused
by the increased SINR cannot contain the linear decrease
caused by reduced allocated subcarriers. The conventional
method showed much better throughput performance than the
other schemes. However, as we saw earlier in Fig 4.3 this
better throughput performance is only in the inner region, and
the cell-edge of the conventional method has the worst
throughput among all investigated schemes
CONCLUSION
The problem of improving cell-edge throughput of LTE
networks has been an extensive area of research in both
academia and industry. Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) has
been proposed as ICIC technique to solve the cell-edge
problem, in which each cell is divided into inner and outer
region with different frequency reuse factor in each region.
Strict FFR and SFR have been evaluated as types of FFR, in
comparison with conventional frequency reuse. It is found that
in spite of the fact that Strict FFR provides the best cell-edge
users' SINR performance, this is not reflected in terms of cell-
edge throughput due to the small bandwidth utilization. SFR
increases cell-edge SINR and throughput by increasing the
power control factor, but this comes at cost of corresponding
decrease of these metrics in the inner region, thus making a
tradeoff between inner and cell-edge throughput. However,
both Strict FFR and SFR provide lower performance than
conventional method in the inner region, and the improvements
occur only in the cell-edge region.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Jean Mobark, Youmna El
Bitar and Abeer Haddad from the American University of
Beirut for their help in access to some papers in the
IEEEXplore library. The authors also like to thank Dr. Ghassan
Mohammed Taha Ali and Prof. Sharief Fadul Babikir from
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
University of Khartoum for their efforts in reviewing this
paper.
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