In a radio network environment, reducing interference among overlapping cells

A controller for controlling a femtocell, the controller comprising:

• a transceiver;
• and
• a processor operatively connected to the transceiver and configured for obtaining soft-frequency-reuse (SFR) information of a macrocell overlapping the femtocell, for analyzing the obtained SFR information to distinguish between frequency sub-channels to be assigned to cell-center users of the macrocell and frequency sub-channels to be assigned to cell-edge users of the macrocell, for giving high schedule priority for femtocell-downlink transmissions to frequency sub-channels to be assigned to cell-center users of the macrocell, and for transmitting, via the transceiver, to a user of the femtocell on a high-schedule-priority frequency sub-channel.

A controller for controlling a macrocell, the controller comprising:

• a transceiver;
• and
• a processor operatively connected to the transceiver and configured for assigning a first set of frequency sub-channels to be used by cell-center users of the macrocell, for assigning a second set of frequency sub-channels to be used by cell-edge users of the macrocell, for detecting that a cell-center user of the macrocell is close enough to the femtocell, and for scheduling the cell-center user as a cell-edge user.

A controller for controlling a macrocell, the controller comprising:

• a transceiver;
• and
• a processor operatively connected to the transceiver and configured for assigning a first set of frequency sub-channels to be used by cell-center users of the macrocell, for assigning a second set of frequency sub-channels to be used by cell-edge users of the macrocell, for detecting that a cell-center user of the macrocell is close enough to the femtocell, and for assigning higher schedule priority for the cell-center user of the macrocell that is close enough to the femtocell to a subset of the first set of frequency sub-channels than to frequency sub-channels in the first set but not in the subset.