Inter-cell interference (ICI) is always a big obstacle to attain wide area coverage and high spectral efficiency in cellular systems. In this work we make a study of two well-known frequency reuse approaches, namely the Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR) scheme and the Incremental Frequency Reuse (IFR) scheme. Both of them aim to mitigate excessive ICI among neighboring cells. Based on a discussion of their advantages and limitations, we propose a novel method, named Enhanced Fractional Frequency Reuse (EFFR) scheme, which is combined with a power allocation and an interference-aware reuse mechanism to achieve not only ICI limitation at cell edge but also a great enhancement of overall cell capacity in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based communication networks. We implement the proposed EFFR scheme in a system-level simulator and compare its performance with which using the SFR scheme, the IFR scheme as well as two classical reuse schemes. In order to reach a reliable evaluation, schemes are simulated with individual power masks, and using a scenario with surrounding cells up to 2nd-tier. The simulation results show that the EFFR scheme outperforms all the other schemes and can gain substantial improvements in terms of both the overall cell capacity as well as the cell coverage. Moreover, through the evaluations we disclose some crucial hints, which impact the performance of the SFR scheme significantly. And consequently substantiates that the EFFR scheme is more flexible and robust than the SFR scheme.
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