Frequency and Subcarrier Reuse Partitioning for FH-OFDMA Cellular Systems

One of the most serious factors constraining the next generation cellular mobile consumer communication systems will be the severe co-channel interference experienced at the cell edge. Such a capacity-degrading impairment combined with the limited available spectrum resource makes it essential to develop more spectrally efficient solutions to enhance the system performance and enrich the mobile user's application services. This paper proposes a unique hybrid method of frequency hopping (FH) and subcarrier-reuse-partitioning that can maximize the system capacity by efficiently utilizing the available spectrum while at the same time reduce the co-channel interference effect. The main feature of the proposed method is that it applies an optimal combination of different frequency reuse factors (FRF) and FH-subcarrier allocation patterns into the partitioned cell regions. From the simulation results, it is shown that the proposed method can achieve the optimum number of subcarrier subsets according to the frequency-reuse distance and results in better performance than the fixed FRF methods, for a given partitioning arrangement. The results are presented in the context of both blocking probability and BER performances. It will also be shown how the proposed scheme is well suited to FH-OFDMA based cellular systems aiming at low co-channel interference performance and optimized number of subcarriers.