A New Frequency Planning for Improved Capacity and Coverage in Sectorized OFDMA Cellular Networks

Abstract

One of the main challenges in cellular systems is how to reduce Other Cells Interference (OCI) while keeping high spectral efficiency and high coverage probability. Since the beginning of cellular technologies, frequency planning with sectoring has been used to mitigate such OCI. However, in modern wireless Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) technologies much attention is being paid to more complex strategies like Coordintation Multi-Point transmission/reception (CoMP) techniques due to its higher performance. This paper presents a new frequency planning for sectorized cell networks. Simulation results show that this scheme considerably outperforms classical sectoring (CS) in terms of both capacity and coverage probability. In particular, for the case of hexagonal grid, the capacity improvement is around 6 b/s/Hz compared to CS while keeping a coverage probability higher than 0.9 for a 0 dB Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) threshold.