A zone assignment algorithm for fractional frequency reuse in mobile WiMAX networks

Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) is a key concept for increasing the spectral efficiency of OFDMA-based broadband wireless access systems such as Mobile WiMAX. One of the main challenges when using FFR is to decide which mobile stations are assigned to which FFR time zone within a WiMAX MAC frame, so that the frame resource utilization efficiency is maximized while meeting the QoS demands of all users. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm to address this problem with low computational complexity. The performance of the algorithm is compared with the optimum zone assignment. The evaluation has been conducted by means of a comprehensive simulation study of a typical Mobile WiMAX deployment scenario with various numbers of VoIP users.