Interference Mitigation in Heterogeneous Networks Using Fractional Frequency Reuse

Abstract

Recently, the mobile data traffic has grown at a rate that no one could predict. This data explosion required innovative solutions to be able to face the continuous increase in the data growth of the mobile users. Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced comes as a promising solution to solve the data explosion problem. The recent researches demonstrate that most of the data traffic is created indoors where the macrocell coverage decreases due to the increased path loss indoors. Also, the macrocell coverage deteriorates at the cell edges. Therefore, solving these coverage problems is the key for the successful deployment of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). Femtocells are the rising new technology aiming to enhance the coverage for LTE-A networks. Femtocells are either consumer-deployed to enhance the indoor coverage or operator-deployed to enhance the coverage at the cell edges. When the femtocells are randomly deployed by the consumers, the precise planning of the mobile network is severely damaged and multiple problems arise that could deteriorate the performance of the whole mobile network if they remained unsolved. One of these problems is the interference between the macrocells and femtocells. This problem can be a huge obstacle against deploying the femtocells on a large scale if it was not effectively solved.