Dynamic Strict Fractional Frequency Reuse for Software-Defined 5G Networks

The surge of mobile data traffic has spurred academia and industries to begin developing 5G networks. 5G is meant to overcome limitations of 4G cellular technology relying on the dominant trend of mobile network densification with the deployment of small cell base stations. To accelerate this process, low complexity and inexpensive remote radio heads (RRHs) are deployed massively and connected to a centralized pool of resources. In this work, we study the problem of inter-cell interference (ICI) which arises in frequency reuse one multi-tier 5G networks. We entrust the management of RRHs to a software-defined network controller and we take advantage of network functions virtualization. Our contributions consist of proposing Dynamic Strict Fractional Frequency Reuse (DSFFR), a method to relieve ICI which dynamically divides the small cell area in a different number of sectors. Furthermore, we formulate a joint scheduling problem composed of two schedulers which operate at different time granularity to transmit downlink packets. Modeling the coverage area with the tool of stochastic geometry and solving with simulations the joint scheduling problem, we are able to show that DSFFR outperforms the static scheme. Performances are addressed in terms of spectral efficiency and packet blocking probability.