Patent ID: 8521173

Claim:
A fractional frequency reuse method for assigning physical resource units of a contiguous frequency band to a given sector of a cell including at least one base station comprising: allocating an initial contiguous, native set of the physical resource units dedicated for transmission of data to users in the given sector; from at least one base station in each out-neighbor sector, receiving an indication of a utility change due to adjustment of the size of the native set for each increment of a pre-determined set of increments, wherein an out-neighbor sector is a sector that is subjected to interference from the given sector that exceeds an interference threshold; computing a total utility change for each of the increments based on utility changes of the out-neighbor sectors and selecting one of the increments for adjusting the size of the native set based on the total utility change; and transmitting the data to the users in the given sector on the native set of the physical resource units adjusted in accordance with the selected increment.