A REM enabled soft frequency reuse scheme

Abstract

Optimizing the network performance is a key objective for cellular operators as over-provisioning a network is definitely not a cost-effective solution. However the trend for the upcoming 4G networks is to simplify the planning procedure and to improve the spectral efficiency by using agressive frequency reuse schemes, e.g reuse-1, in the downlink. In this paper, we show that this is not a suitable configuration in terms of network performance and describe a simple Radio Environment Map (REM) enabled soft frequency reuse (SFR) scheme which improves the user throughput of about 14%.