  Modern cellular standards typically incorporate interference coordination
schemes allowing near universal frequency reuse while preserving reasonably
high spectral efficiencies over the whole coverage area. In particular,
fractional frequency reuse (FFR) and its variants are deemed to play a
fundamental role in the next generation of cellular deployments (B4G/5G
systems). This paper presents an analytical framework allowing the downlink
performance evaluation of FFR-aided OFDMA networks when using channel-aware
scheduling policies. Remarkably, the framework contemplates the use of
different rate allocation strategies, thus allowing to assess the network
behaviour under ideal (capacity-based) or realistic (throughput-based)
conditions. Analytical performance results are used to optimise the FFR
parameters as a function of, for instance, the resource block scheduling policy
or the density of UEs per cell. Furthermore, different optimisation designs of
the FFR component are proposed that allow a tradeoff between throughput
performance and fairness by suitably dimensioning the FFR-defined cell-centre
and cell-edge areas and the corresponding frequency allocation to each region.
Numerical results serve to confirm the accuracy of the proposed analytical
model while providing insight on how the different parameters and designs
affect network performance.
