Fractional frequency reuse planning for WiMAX over frequency selective channels

Fourth generation broadband wireless access systems based on OFDMA/OFDM techniques operate in point-to-multipoint (PMP) configuration so that conventional cellular planning methods can be used for network design. As an alternative planning method fractional frequency reuse (FFR) strategy has been recently proposed for OFDMA/OFDM cellular systems such as WiMAX. For what concerns the determination of the system outage prediction, planning procedures for multi-carrier systems are usually based on bit error rate curves as a function of the average signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR). Such curves are obtained after simulating the entire transmitter-receiver chain including multipath channel. However these approaches do not explicitly evidence the role of the number of M sub-carriers allocated to each user and are computationally intensive. In order to avoid such inconveniences we express the outage probability as a function of the effective SINR which is a function of the M SINRs (one for each sub-carrier). Such function already includes the decoding effects thus avoiding the re-simulation of the decoder behavior. Furthermore, this approach allows to explicitly evidence the role on planning of the number of subcarriers allocated for one user. For evaluation purposes we apply the procedure in a simple two cell FFR interference scenario. It is shown that the number of sub-carriers can play a significant role in the entire planning process i.e. the reuse distance can be lowered at the expense of an increased number of sub-carriers to be allocated per block. © 2008 IEEE.