⁠Performance Enhancement of Cell Edge Users in NOMA Based Systems Using Fractional Frequency Reuse

Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) causes significant performance loss for cell‐edge users due to strong intercell interference and fairness constraints under dense deployments. Although fractional frequency reuse (FFR) to improve dependability, especially for cell‐edge users, is widely researched, joint optimization with SINR‐based zoning and NOMA scheduling remains limited. An integrated FFR‐NOMA scheduling architecture is proposed, as there is a tremendous need to enhance the spectral efficiency, throughput, system capacity, and user fairness for LTE‐Advanced and beyond 5G networks. Power domain NOMA with successive interference cancelation (SIC) is implemented within each zone of the method, which uses SINR‐based cell zoning with optimized threshold selection to enable reuse‐1 in the cell center and reuse‐3 at the cell boundary. Compared to the traditional schedulers like proportional fair (PF), max–min (MM), resource fair (RF), round robin (RR), and modified largest weighted delay first (MLWDF), FFR‐NOMA demonstrated a 45% improvement in spectral efficiency, a 7%–12% gain in average user throughput, a 1%–6% enhancement in cell‐edge throughput, and a 30%–50% increase in average cell throughput. The proposed FFR‐NOMA framework improves per‐user rate by 12.3%, edge‐user rate by 26%, and fairness index by 4% compared to conventional NOMA systems, providing a robust, interference‐resilient, and high‐capacity solution suitable for next‐generation wireless networks.