In this paper we investigate performance of frequency
domain packet scheduling (FDPS) under fractional load
(FL), based on the UTRAN Long Term Evolution downlink.
FL may be regarded as an inter-cell interference (ICI) mitigation
technique, which can improve the user experienced
SINR. We consider FL based on transmission using a subset
of the time-frequency resources, in an un-coordinated manner
throughout the cellular network. On the basis of detailed system-level
simulations we find that FDPS under FL can provide a
performance trade-off between improvement in coverage and the
loss in cell throughput. For example, at FL of 25% the coverage
is improved by a factor of two, while the average cell throughput
is halved, compared to the full load case. Further, it is shown
that FDPS performance is sensitive to the rate at which state
transition of the time-frequency resources takes place as link
adaptation is not able to track fast variations in the SINR.