Dynamic Fractional Frequency Reuse Based Hybrid
Resource Management for Femtocell Networks
Faisal Tariq, Laurence S Dooley and Adrian S Poulton
Department of Communication and Systems
The Open University, UK
Email: f.tariq|l.s.dooley|a.s.poulton@open.ac.uk
Abstract—Femtocell access points are inexpensive, plug and
play home base stations designed to extend radio coverage and
increase capacity within indoor environments. Their inherent
uncoordinated and overlaid deployment however, means existing
radio resource management (RRM) techniques are often inef-
fectual. Recent advances in dynamic RRM have emphasised the
need for more efficient resource management strategies. While
centralised resource management offers improved coordination
and operator control giving better interference management, it
is not scalable for increasing nodes. Distributed management
techniques in contrast, do afford scaled deployment, but at higher
node densities incur performance degradation in both system
throughput and link-quality because of poor coordination. The
level of spectrum sharing mandated by macro-femto deployment
also impacts on system throughput and is scenario dependant.
This paper presents a new hybrid resource management algo-
rithm(HRMA) for down-links in orthogonal frequency division
multiple access-based systems, with the model analysed for a
range of macro-femto deployment scenarios. HRMA employs a
dynamic fractional frequency reuse scheme for macro-cell deploy-
ment with frequency reuse defined for femto users depending on
their location by making certain frequencies locally available
based on macro-femto tier information sharing and efficient
localised spectrum utilisation. Quantitative performance results
confirm the efficacy of the HRMA strategy for various key system
metrics including interference minimisation, outage probability
and throughput.
Keywords- Femtocell, Hybrid RRM, Dynamic Spectrum Manage-
ment, Two Tier Network, Cognitive Radio.
I. I NTRODUCTION
With the increasing demand for high data-rate wireless
services in indoor scenarios, supporting data services from
conventional cellular base stations (BS) is becoming more
challenging due to the generally poor indoor propagation
characteristics. Deploying more BS for better coverage is
prohibitively expensive, so femtocell access point (FAP) or
so-called home BS offer an attractive, low-cost plug and
play alternative to extend indoor coverage [1]. Connecting
a FAP to either an optical fibre or a digital subscriber line
based, backhaul-wired broadband network provides a number
of advantages. It offloads authorised indoor users from the
macrocell thereby increasing the available spectrum for other
users. The small distances involved with FAP, typically
<10m, also mean such links are more robust and improve the
quality-of-service provision to a subscriber, with concomitant
978-1-4577-9538-2/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Yusheng Ji
Information Systems Architecture Research Division
National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Email: kei@nii.ac.jp
gains in system capacity and mobile station battery lifetimes.
Despite these benefits, femtocells can cause potential
interference with co-located femtocell and macrocell
users operating in the same frequency band. The intrinsic
uncoordinated nature of femtocell deployment compounds the
challenge of managing interference in such two-tier models.
Traditional radio resource management (RRM) policies
have been static in nature, with the spectrum assigned to a
user being fixed regardless of instantaneous changes to the
radio environment. This leads to inefficient spectrum and
energy usage. To ensure better utilisation of locally available
spectrum in rapidly changing environments, an assortment of
dynamic RRM techniques have been proposed [2], [3], [4],
where both spectrum and energy can be either dynamically
switched or modified according to the radio environment
variables at particular geographic spatial and temporal values.
Existing RRM algorithms such as [5], were not designed
for multi-tier radio system deployment, so new resource
management paradigms have to be developed to handle the
associated challenges involved in multi-tier environments.
Since femtocells are more likely to be deployed overlay to a
macrocell, with neither centralised control nor coordination
functions being available, the management of both femto-
macro and femto-femto interference is a critical design
prerequisite [6]. Careful RRM design is thus imperative in
such dual-tier systems, to successfully enable femto-macro
coexistence.
Several techniques [7], [8] have been proposed to both
minimise interference and improve system efficiency from
a capacity and resource management perspective. In [7] for
example, the effect of femtocell deployment on macrocell
users performance was evaluated at various distances from a
BS, though the corresponding impact on other femtocell users
was not considered, while the uplink capacity and interference
avoidance strategy in [8], was developed for Code Division
Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, though next generation
technologies are more likely to be Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based.
One strategy to mitigate cross-tier interference is to employ
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orthogonal spectrum for the respective macro and femto
systems, though this results in less available spectrum for
both tiers which compromises overall system capacity [9].
An alternative scheme is co-channel deployment where both
macro and femtocell systems operate in the same frequency
band [9]. While this is the most desirable solution as both tiers
have full spectrum access, it generates significant cross-tier
interference especially in high density deployments. Despite
this limitation, provided the available radio resources can be
efficiently distributed then superior system performance is
attainable.
A recently proposed technique for macro-cellular
communications is fractional frequency reuse (FFR) [10]
[11], where the reuse factor n > 1, is the number of distinct
sets of channels used in the system. FFR is applied at
cell-edges to avoid inter-cell interference (ICI). Dynamic
FFR adopts a similar strategy except it adjusts the amount
of spectrum allocated to certain locations based upon the
instantaneous traffic load. This means particular frequencies
are not used by the macrocell in some areas, creating the
opportunity for the femto-cell system to exploit this vacant
spectrum. A design prerequisite for the femtocell to be able
to exploit this unused resource is that localised spectral
information is available at the femto-tier, which mandates
some level of cross-tier information sharing within the system.
Another important aspect of femtocell resource management
is deciding whether the resource allocation is made either
centrally or locally. The former offers better system control but
incurs redundant data transmissions. Conversely, distributed
models require less data exchange and offer a degree of
user autonomy, but suffer from interference degradation
due to inadequate information concerning interference and
resource usage by neighbouring FAPs, especially in dense
deployment scenarios [6]. This provided the motivation to
explore the development of hybrid resource management
paradigms that combine the latent benefits of both centralised
and distributed techniques and intelligently switch between
them depending upon the prevailing deployment scenario and
system requirement.
This paper investigates seamlessly embedding a femtocell
tier within a resource distribution framework to create a
two-tier system, which crucially incorporates a cross-tier
spectrum sharing strategy. Instead of a fully distributed
resource allocation model, a hybrid RRM approach is adopted
which bifurcates management responsibilities, so allowing
certain tasks to be performed centrally and others locally, with
appropriate information sharing between the tiers. A hybrid
resource management algorithm (HMRA) is presented for the
downlink of an OFDMA system, which applies dynamic FFR
in the macro-tier and then exploits this information when
allocating the same frequency bands to FAPs in different
locations. This minimises both cross and intra-tier interference
and concomitantly improves overall system capacity, user
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throughput, and link quality and coverage. Numerical analysis
corroborates the superior system performance achieved using
this multi-tier HRMA, from both a signal to interference-
plus-noise ratio (SINR) and throughput perspective.
The remainder of the paper is organised as follows: Section
II describes the system model, while Section III presents the
new HRMA paradigm and its constituent blocks. Section IV
details both the network simulation environment setup and
corresponding results analysis, with some conclusions being
provided in Section V.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
A two-tier, macro-femtocell overlay system model is
considered, with each macrocell being hexagonally-shaped,
with a BS located at the centre of the cell. A macrocell
comprises three sectors with macro user equipment (MUE)
being uniformly distributed across each sector, independently
of both the number of femtocell user equipment (FUE) and
FAP locations. Femtocells are circular in shape and uniformly
distributed inside each macrocell. It is assumed the FAP is
located at the centre of a femtocell and the FUE are also
uniformly distributed inside the cell area. FAP transmission
power is fixed and the macrocell BS power is also fixed,
but with different transmit powers for the inner and outer
cell MUEs. Only closed access systems are considered with
each FAP possessing a closed subscriber group (CSG) of
authorised FUE. This restricts the macro users approved to be
handed over to a FAP to just CSG members. From a resource
allocation stance, the resource block (RB) concept defined in
the 3GPP-LTE standard [13] is adopted.
1) Path Loss Model: For outdoor environments, the path
loss model recommended in the 3GPP-LTE standard [13]
is used. This is formally defined in 1, while for indoor
scenarios the WINNER II [14] channel model-based path loss
is employed. For Non Line-of-Sight (NLOS) situations where
there are walls between the transmitter and receiver, a wall
penetration loss (LW P ) component is included. Equations 2
and 3 provide the respective indoor path losses for the Line
of Sight (LOS) and NLOS cases.
d fc
P L1 = 128.1 + 37.6 ∗ log10 + 21 ∗ log10 + LW P (1)
1000 2.0
fc
P L2(LOS) = 18.7 ∗ log10 (d) + 46.8 + 20 ∗ log10 (2)
5
fc
P L2(N LOS) = 20∗log10 (d)+46.4+20∗log10 +LW P (3)
5
where P L is the relevant path loss, fc is the carrier
frequency (GHz), d is the distance (m) and LW P is the wall
penetration loss (dB).
 2) Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR): As alluded in
Section I, the procedure in [10], is adopted to both mitigate
and coordinate ICI in OFDMA-based systems. It divides the
macrocell into an inner and outer area, with the latter being
further sub-divided into multiple sectors. Figure 1 illustrates
the FFR scheme for macro and femtocell networks, where F
represents macrocell spectrum, with the individual subscripts
denoting the respective areas. f denotes the available femtocell
spectrum, with the subscripts now indicating to which macro
sector the spectrum originally belonged. Spectrum set FS is
formally defined as: FS = b(Nrb ∗ (NS /N ))c where Nrb is
the total number of RB, NS the number of MUE in area S
and N the total number of MUE in the whole cell.
Fig. 1. Spectrum distribution: FFR scheme for macro tier and alternate sets
for femto tier.
Fig. 2. Spectrum partitioning example for FFR scheme
In considering the example scheme in Figure 1, FA
indicates the available spectrum for MUE in area A. The
FAPs in A have access to fS , fB and fC sets of spectrum
which means they were originally allocated to MUE located
in areas S, B and C respectively. Figure 2 shows a spectrum
partitioned resource example for different areas, where fR is
the reserved set which contains the regularly updated set of
channels that become free when released by either a MUE
or RB. The principal advantage of this FFR-based scheme
is that it eliminates cross-tier interference because mutually
exclusive spectrum is used for each tier, which allows the
design focus to be on managing interference in the femto-tier
only. In this paper, it is assumed the average load in each area
is proportional to the number of active MUE in that area,
and the spectrum is partitioned for each area in accordance
with the load. It is also assumed the average user demand
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remains constant, so the amount of spectrum allocated to an
area with time, varies in accordance with the MUE density
and is updated after some predefined time interval.
III. THE HYBRID RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
ALGORITHM (HRMA)
This algorithm combines elements of both a centralised
and distributed resource management approach, undertaking
certain tasks centrally using the Radio Network Controller
(RNC), and the remainder locally by the in situ FAPs. This
arrangement avoids both unnecessary communication via
the backhaul network and innate delays in the decision
making. The RNC undertakes the range of management
and control functions it is usually assigned in a traditional
cellular system, including: registering and authenticating
FAPs, assigning spectrum chunks to each FAP by considering
the macro-tier load and MUE allocations to ensure mutual
exclusiveness between tiers; dispute handling between FAPs
and the management of the database containing the FAP
location information. The FAPs in contrast, manage FUE
information and make local spectrum allocation decisions
based upon feedback received from the FUEs. HRMA
essentially comprises three constituent blocks, the functions
of which will now be individually described along with the
key roles of the RNC and FAPs in each block.
Fig. 3. Example of overlapping and non-overlapping FAP, where the x and
y axes are distance (m)
a) Registration and Discovery Block: When a FAP is
switching on, it registers with the RNC and is assigned a
unique ID. As each FAP is connected to the RNC via a
back-haul network, the approximate position of both the FAP
in the sector and neighbouring BS is known to the central
controller. Utilising this information, the RNC updates the
database for each femtocell as F APi,t (Nf i , Si , Rf i ) , where
F APi,t is the ith femtocell at time t and Si is the area in
which the femtocell is located. Nf i is the set of neighbours
which may potentially overlap coverage (see example in
Figure 3), which is generated by monitoring whether a
registered FAP falls within a distance of dnb of the FAP in
the given sector. Rf i is the set of resources accessible to a
femtocell, with the following relation needing to be upheld,
Rf i ∩ Rm = Φ where Rm is the set of resources allocated to
the macro-tier in the same area.

b) Spectrum Allocation Block: One of the principal RNC

roles is to notify each FAP concerning its allocated spectrum
partition. It ensures members receive mutually exclusive chan-
nel sets to avoid severe interference, before each FAP allocates
the channel from the assigned set to each user independently.
This allocation is based on the channel state information (CSI)
measurement which is defined as:
C Pt0 ∗ h0
=P (4) Fig. 4. Snapshot showing 50 femtocells and 30 MUE located in a macrocell
I j rj ∗ hj + N0
P of radius 400m
where C is the carrier power, I the interference-plus-noise
power, Pt0 the signal power, h0 the channel gain, Prj the
received power on channel r from user j, and hj the channel the signal and operating frequency. To analyse the impact
gain for user j. of wall penetration losses, we firstly simulated FAPs with
a fixed LW P , prior to allocating channels in a dense FAP
c) Dispute Management Block (DMB): When FUE deployment (200 in a macrocell), and the corresponding SINR
performance degrades below a prescribed threshold, the evaluated for different LW P values. The resulting cumulative
corresponding FAP firstly attempts to hop to the second best distribution functions (CDF) are plotted in Figure 5. It is
available channel for the next transmission of the relevant readily apparent for LW P = 15dB, that the corresponding
FUE. If the problem persists, it flags the RNC with the ID interference is lower, leading to a higher SINR, because of
of the interference creator FAP. The RNC then examines the the higher absorption by the wall compared to both 10dB and
allocated frequencies of the disputing FUEs and reassigns 5dB losses. It has been shown in [15], that wall penetration
new channels to each. If all partitions are fully used, it will losses can vary anywhere between 3 and 16dB, so in the
then allocate channels from the system reservoir fR as shown simulations, a randomly generated LW P value between 3 and
in Figure 2. 16dB (see Table I) has been used for each house or FAP to
compute the interference power, which was fixed for each
The database containing the spectrum partitioning details simulation run. To calculate the received signal power, a thin
is regularly updated as is the corresponding femto-tier indoor wall was assumed and values for each FUE generated
information. After a certain time interval, all FAP update in the 0 to 6 dB range.
with the latest macro-tier spectrum partition information and
then execute the localised component of the HRMA until a
dispute occurs, whereupon control is relinquished to the RNC
to centrally manage the resolution via DMB (Section IIIc).

IV. S IMULATION E NVIRONMENT AND R ESULTS

To analyse the performance of HRMA, a number of
different deployment densities and scenarios were considered.
A dedicated simulation environment was developed using
MATLABTM , to simulate various scenarios and quantitatively
evaluate the corresponding performance. Figure 4 shows a 50
femtocell deployment example in a macrocell area of radius
400m

A modified wall penetration loss model was applied in

the simulations to better reflect real-world situations. In
most simulations, fixed wall penetration losses LW P of
5dB, 10dB or 15dB are assumed for evaluation purposes,
though in reality penetration losses vary depending upon
the thickness and material of the wall, angle of arrival of Fig. 5. Impact of wall penetration losses. LW P

275
 TABLE II
To quantitatively analyse HRMA performance, it was com- N UMBER OF OVERLAPPING INSTANCES AND AVERAGED NORMALISED
pared with: i) a base-line algorithm (BLA), representing the ALLOCATION DISPUTES AS A RATIO OF THE TOTAL NUMBER OF
ALLOCATIONS , FOR DIFFERENT FAP DEPLOYMENT DENSITIES
condition where the femto-tier operates independently of the
macro-tier and there is no inter-tier information sharing and FAP deployed Number of Average
ii) a ccentralized resource management (CRM) scheme, which Overlapping cases Normalized Disputes
makes all decisions at the RNC, and where full cross-tier 20 2 0.01
100 13 0.04
information is available so all spectrum decisions can be made
200 38 0.11
by considering interference from all co-channel operators,
regardless of their location in the macrocell. Each layer has
access to the full spectrum. The number of femtocells was to significant redundant data transmissions which consume
varied between 20 and 200, and HRMA, CRM and BLA valuable bandwidth. This problem is compounded at higher
applied to each test deployment scenario. The network en- deployment densities, with the corresponding computational
vironment parameters used in all simulations are detailed in cost increasing exponentially. HRMA in contrast, achieves
Table I and the user throughput calculated using Shannon’s an analogous SINR performance to CRM while incurring a
capacity formula: much lower computational overhead as evidenced in Table II.
Table II displays the occurrences of FAP overlapping together
R = BW ∗ log2 (1 + SIN R) (5) with the average normalised dispute ratio (the number of
where R is the achieved rate and BW the bandwidth of disputes divided by total number of spectrum allocations
each RB. and number of iterations) for various deployment densities.
This reflects those instances where RNC communication
TABLE I is necessary. For 20, 100 and 200 FAPs, HRMA required
N ETWORK ENVIRONMENT PARAMETERS USED IN ALL SIMULATIONS . only 1%, 4% and 11% respectively of the time in RNC
spectrum decision communications, compared with 100%
System Parameter Value or Range for CRM. As anticipated for larger FAP numbers, intra-tier
Femtocell Radius 10 m interference increased and the corresponding SINR dropped
Macrocell Radius 400 m
Number of Femtocell per Macrocell 20, 100, 200 m in all three algorithms, though HRMA still maintained a
FUE Noise Figure 9 dB superior performance compared to BLA. This improvement
MUE Noise Figure 9 dB is directly related to the DMB mechanism (Section III(c))
Wall Penetration Loss (Interference) Variable (3 to 16 dB) which avoided severe femto-tier interference in overlapping
Wall Penetration Loss (Signal) Variable (0 to 6 dB)
Log normal Shadowing 6 dB FAPs by referring any dispute to the RNC.
Macrocell Transmission Power 46 dBm, 20dBm
FAP Transmit Power 0 dBm
Macro BS Antenna Gain 15 dBi
FUE Min. Power Requirement > 0 dB
Total Bandwidth 10 MHz
Number of Simulations 10000
Number of Resource Blocks (RB) 50
RB Size 180 KHz, 1 mS

Figure 6 plots the respective SINR performance of each

algorithm for three different deployment densities of 20,
100 and 200 FAP in one macrocell. The results reveal that
for each deployment density, HRMA outperformed BLA
and had a very similar SINR performance to the CRM
scheme, which consistently performed best due to all the
inter-tier information being continually available. Since there
is no cross-tier information sharing in BLA, interference is
comparatively high because of the simultaneous allocation of
the same RB to both macro and femto tiers. In addition, there
is interference from neighbouring femtocells operating in the
same RB at the same time instant. In contrast, as HRMA Fig. 6. SINR performance of different algorithms at various FAP deployment
centrally exploits dynamic FFR to assign mutually exclusive densities.
spectrum for inter-tier users, no such macro-tier interference
affects transmissions in the femto-tier. The results in Table II also confirm that the dispute level
increases with deployment density, and since BLA does
The main disadvantage of CRM is that it communicates not have a DMB mechanism to manage such situations, its
with the central entity (RNC) during every decision leading performance deteriorates markedly as shown in Figure 6.

276
Conversely for CRM, all the FAP allocation information is
available to the RNC, so it can apportion spectrum in such a
ways so the total interference is always a minimum, giving it
better performance than the other algorithms. Interestingly an
analogous trend is observed in the corresponding throughput
curves for HRMA, BLA and CRM in Figure 7. In the 200
FAP deployment, the severe interference in BLA means an
almost 50% outage occurs for a minimum SINR requirement
of 0dB, which worsens to 70% when the minimum SINR
of 5dB is specified. In contrast, since the HRMA paradigm
has been designed to attenuate femto-tier interference, it
respectively exhibits significantly lower outage probabilities
of 12% and 38% respectively for the 0dB and 5dB SINR
requirements, which is again very similar to the CRM
performance.
Fig. 7. FUE throughput curves (bits/Hz/transmission frame) for various FAP
deployment densities for different algorithms.
Finally in Figure 7 the corresponding bit throughput
characteristics are presented, with HRMA clearly providing
an enhanced performance. Even for 200 FAP deployments,
where the interference level is at its highest, 50% of the time
users achieved a bit-rate of at least 3 bits/Hz per transmission
frame or greater for HRMA compared with only 20% for
BLA. Commensurate improvements in HRMA throughout
are also evident in the other FAP deployment density curves.
V. C ONCLUSION
This paper has presented a new hybrid resource
management algorithm (HRMA) for femtocell networks.
Using a dynamic fractional frequency reuse scheme for
macrocell deployment with frequency reuse being defined
for users based on their location, HRMA exploits cross-
tier information to concomitantly eliminate macro-femto
interference and significantly reduce femto-tier interference,
which can be particularly severe at high femtocell access
277
point deployment densities. Superior performance vis--vis
both outage probability and system throughput has also
been corroborated. Further improvements are envisaged
by cooperatively allocating spectrum based upon a joint
power-spectrum scheduling strategy, which will be the focus
of future research into HRMA development.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank both The Open University,
UK and NII, Japan for their financial support in undertaking
this research.
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