GRD Journals | Global Research and Development Journal for Engineering | International Conference on Innovations in Engineering and Technology

(ICIET) - 2016 | July 2016

e-ISSN: 2455-5703

Dynamic Grouping and Frequency Reuse Scheme

for Dense Small Cell Network
1B.Sridevi 2R.Shakanapriya 3R.Jeyalakshmi 4P.Saranya
1

Assistant Professor 2,3,4Student

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
1,2,3,4
Velammal college of engineering and technology, Madurai

1,2,3,4

Abstract
Small cell networks have emerged as a key technology in residential, office building or hotspot deployments that can significantly
fulfil high data demands in order to offload indoor traffic from outdoor macro cells. However, as one of the major challenges,
inter-small cell interference gets worse in some building scenarios because of the presence of numerous interfering sources and
then needs to be considered in early network planning phase. Though, penetration loss and complex indoor environment make that
it is difficult for existing cellular network to sufficiently follow the demand in indoor mobile traffic. The deployment of small cells
is envisioned to be a key solution for providing high wireless data-rates, offloading the macro cell traffic and enhancing the
coverage of existing networks. Based on the edge nodes all interfering nodes in the small cells are grouped into number of groups,
and then the frequency reuse factor is applied according to the dominance interference strength. Hence the power gets transmitted
for different groups according to the interference strength. Simulation results shows, the proposed scheme yields great performance
gain in terms of the efficiency relative to the universal frequency reuse.
Keyword- In-building small cell networks; frequency reuse
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, it has been reported that about 80% of wireless communication traffic comes from indoors[1]. The deployment of
femtocells is envisioned to be a key solution for providing high wireless data-rates, offloading the macro cell traffic and enhancing
the coverage of existing networking [2].Small cells can be densely deployed in a small area such as an office building, hotspot
area, or residential area. Nevertheless, an unplanned or random user-installed deployment faces several problems and challenges
in terms of interference management and backhaul constraints [3]. In co-channel deployments, all small cells reuse the spectrum
resources, and interference from other small cells might significantly deteriorate the overall system performance by multiple
dominant interferences, which are from small cells not only on the same floor due to adjacent deployment, but also on the upper
and lower floors due to cross-floor signal penetration. Hence, interference modelling used in traditional cellular scenario is not
proper in a building environment. Currently, several interference mitigation schemes in macro base station scenario have been
widely studied mainly by means of interference randomization, interference control, interference suppress, and interference
coordination. In the first class the interference is averaged across the whole spectrum via spreading sequences (e.g. scrambling and
interleaving),and therefore is not actually cancelled out. The second class uses the power control and static beam forming to reduce
the interference level. But by contrast, in the third class, the interference is successfully suppressed by using advanced signal
processing techniques [4]. Although these techniques are becoming popular, however, the complexity at the receiver side and
backhaul constraint are still the challenging issues particularly in the presences of multiple dominant interferences. Inter-Cell
Interference Coordination (ICIC) techniques [5], on the other hand, present pragmatically a more feasible solution. Unlike the
macro base station, small base stations can be installed by users in a random manner, making it difficult to handle the interference
problem. The traditional methods can be applied to the mitigation of inter-small cell interference when femtocells are deployed in
a systematic way with low density[6]. However, when multiple small cells are densely deployed in a building environment, the
interference source will be greatly increased, and the interference scenario will drastically vary due to a large number of dominant
random interfering nodes. In order to mitigate the inter-femtocell interference in the dense environment, several methods have
been proposed, e.g. Fractional Frequency Reuse(FFR) [7-8], which uses the flexible Frequency Reuse Factors (FRF) in the celledge in the cell- edge area and cell-centre area. But in Ref. [7], dense inter-small cell interference is not specially considered. While
in Ref. [8], a small cell can be granted admission into a group only when it interferes with all the small cells already admitted by
that group. However, it should be noted that it has high computational complexity and the graph based method is very flexible.
Therefore, different admission control criterions can be developed to tune the size of each group, and spectrum resource can be
fully used for each group to improve the spectrum efficiency. In this paper, a new soft frequency reuse
Scheme is proposed for interference management in dense small cell networks, which was partly presented in Ref. [9].
Based on the Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) from the serving users, the multiple interfering small cells can be
determined to form several groups, and then the minimum sub channels with different soft frequency reuse factors for these groups

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are allocated to provide optimal performance near the cell edge. After the allocation of sub-channels to small cells in each group,
the transmit power on the sub-channel part for the group is adaptively adjusted in term of the interference strength. By making
The use of higher frequency reuse factor with the least number of orthogonal sub-channels according to the deployment
and interference environment, the dense small cells can perform interference mitigation, and consequently improve the overall
system performance. Simulation results show the SINR performance gain is more than 3 dB and the average spectrum efficiency
outperforms 10.12% comparing with the legacy soft FFR scheme. This paper is organized as follows. The system model is
described in Section II. Section III describes the frequency reuse scheme by grouping. In Section IV, the proposed grouping and
the Frequency distribution for groups based on RSSI algorithms are elaborated. Section V provides Simulation results of the
proposed scheme. Finally, Section VI concludes and summarizes the paper.

II. SYSTEM MODEL

We consider an OFDM-based homogeneous cellular network as our baseline system. In this network, we assume that there are M
macro base-stations (MBS) each equipped with three directional antennas, a user density of u users per cell and T sub-channels,
each of bandwidth b. We consider only the downlink traffic in this system and assume that the BSs transmit all the time in all the
channels assigned to them. In Fig. 1, we provide a pictorial depiction of this system. We assume that a frequency reuse factor of 3
is used and T/3 sub-channels are exclusively assigned to each of the directional antennas. We quantify the performance of this
network in terms of the geometric mean (GM) throughput of all the users. We are interested in measuring the impact of deploying
low-power BSs with omnidirectional antennas on the performance of this system.

Fig. 1: macro cell of the baseline system. Each sector is served by one of the directional antenna of the MBSs (represented by the large
triangle).

In a macro cell there are several potential locations for the deployment of the small cells. In the edge region of each small
cell, the coverage is weak and/or the interference can be strong. Since, every point of intersection is shared by three hexagonal
cells, it is easy to see that, for a large network and neglecting edge effects. A user association (UA) policy determines the BS to
which a given user connects with. We consider the following two simple user association (UA) rules. They are
Best SINR: Users associates with the BS that provides the maximum SINR.
Small-cell First (SCF): Under this rule, a user associates with the small cell that gives the maximum SINR provided that this
is greater than a given threshold. If no small cell provides SINR greater than , it associates with the BS that provides the
maximum SINR.

III. FREQUENCY REUSE SCHEME BY GROUPING

In this section, we will review several frequency reuse schemes [5] that are related to our work.
A. Frequency reuse 1 (FR 1)
Frequency reuse 1 is well known as universal frequency reuse scheme, where the entire frequency spectrum is reused over all cells,
as shown in Figure 2. However, by employing this scheme only the cell centre users experience good channel quality whereas cell
edge users suffer from low radio conditions due to severe inter-cell interference.

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Dynamic Grouping and Frequency Reuse Scheme for Dense Small Cell Network
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Fig. 2: The frequency reuse 1 scheme

B. Hard frequency reuse 3

Figure 3 illustrates how the power-frequency resource restrictions are applied at each cell in frequency reuse 3 scheme. It is
important to note that the frequency reuse factor is restricted by a list of integer numbers:{1, 3, 4,7,,i2 + i j + j2 | i, j N }.

Fig. 3: The hard frequency reuse 3 scheme

C. Soft frequency reuse

Soft frequency reuse scheme suggests that cell edge users are scheduled in the protected resources and cell centre users are
scheduled in the shared resources with a lower transmit power, as shown in fig(4).

Fig. 4: The soft frequency reuse scheme

IV. PROPOSED GROUPING

In the dense small cell networks, a user at the edge will be interfered by multiple dominant small cells, especially in the multi-floor
office building, a user on the floor will be interfered by small cell frequency not only on the same floor but also on the upper and
lower floor, and so on due to the cross-floor penetration, which is obviously different from the traditional macro cellular scenario.
Based on the cell-edge regions of small cells. The cell-edge will receive the signal from various small cells, which can be classified
into a number of groups to determine the frequency reuse factors and to set the priority order for the sub-channel allocation of each
group. But for each cell-edge user, there have the different interfering small cells, so the same interfering small cells set is selected
to do the grouping based on the number of users in the edges the small cells grouping is based on the interference graph modelling
method. From the grouping results, this subsection introduces the selection of grouping-based frequency reuse factor. Figure 6
illustrates an example of the proposed scheme, where Small cells are classified into three groups. Instead of having only a group
on top of the cell-edge region, it is possible to form up to multiple virtual groups each using different parts of spectrum and different
frequency reuse factors. Following the concept, the group with the strongest interference strength has the lowest frequency reuse

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factor, the group with the weakest interference strength has the highest frequency reuse factor, and the others are in the middle
[6].Therefore, for Fig (5), the frequency reuse factor for group 1 is 1/3, the group 2 is 2/3, and the group 3 is 3/4. Accordingly, if
there are more groups and more mobile users per group, different frequency reuse factors and frequency partition are used based
on cyclic difference sets.

Fig. 5: An example of proposed soft frequency reuse scheme

It is expected that two nodes that have an edge between them select different sub-channel patterns and frequency reuse
factor according to grouping criterion in order to improve the cell edge performance. The problem of finding out the smallest
number of sub-channels in the in-building scenario can be formulated by calculating the number of mobile users. If there has an
edge. The smallest number of users will be the solution of the problem. If there are not enough cell edge users to be scheduled at
the reserved sub-channel, the sub-channels can be also used for cell-centre users to achieve high resource efficiency. In order to
improve the performance of cell-edge, we adjust the transmit power on the sub-channels of the group based on the RSRP, which
should be adaptively select the transmit power of sub-channel for cell-centre and cell edge. Based on the signal strength in each
grouping the frequency can be reused [9]. The RSSI for the group can be calculated from,
RSRQ = N * RSRP / RSSI

V. SIMULATION RESULTS OF THE PROPOSED SCHEME

The modelling platform is based on MATLAB (matrix laboratory), which is a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment
and fourth generation programming language. It is a proprietary programming language developed by MathWorks, it allows matrix
manipulations of plotting of functions and data implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces and interfacing with
programs written in other languages. In this simulation model, we consider 3 cells in which the base stations provide different
range of frequencies for each cells. The basic structure of cells is shown in fig (6). In these cells the mobile users are represented
as nodes fig (7).

Fig. 6: The basic cell structure

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Dynamic Grouping and Frequency Reuse Scheme for Dense Small Cell Network
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Fig. 7: Grouping of edge nodes

In fig(8), we discussed about the grouping of nodes at the edges, which will suffer from interference and low signal
strength . The nodes at the edges can access the three different frequencies of the cells. Hence frequency interference at the edges
will increase. Therefore, the edge nodes are grouped for frequency reusing.

Fig. 8: Cells with mobile nodes

Frequency for the grouped nodes will be provided by the base station which has less number of nodes fig(9). Hence RSSI
at the edge nodes will be increased and frequency will be mutually shared among all the nodes in the cells. Therefore different
frequency reuse factors and transmit powers for these groups are adjusted adaptively to mitigate the mutual interference.

Fig. 9: Frequency reuse by the nodes.

VI. CONCLUSIONS
Small cell networks, particularly dense small cell networks, are promising to provide extra capacity for high indoor data demands
in enterprise environments. However, dense small cell networks will introduce excessive inter- cell interference in the high storey
building scenarios. More irregular neighbour cell boundaries will be created due to cross-floor signal penetration and then efficient
interference mitigation schemes are required. In this paper, a dynamic soft frequency reuse scheme was proposed for interference
management in dense small cell networks. Based on RSSI, it classifies nodes into a number of groups, and then selects the
frequency reuse factor and the transmit power for different groups according to the interference strength. The final simulation
results show that the proposed scheme achieves not only an enhanced cell-edge spectral efficiency, but also minimal degradation
of a forthcoming co-channel small cell deployment.

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