This paper deals with the planning of two-layer long-term evolution-advanced cellular systems, taking both the co-tier and cross-tier interference into account. In particular, we propose the novel multi-level soft frequency reuse (MSFR) scheme, where the users in three different regions of a macro/micro cell adopt distinct frequency segments and different transmission power levels. The optimization of power control parameters and cell association with MSFR results in a non-convex problem. We present the iterative-MSFR (I-MSFR) scheme, where the main optimization problem is divided into two sub-problems that can be subsequently solved by means of classical optimization methods. Finally, we propose two simplified schemes that achieve a comparable performance as I-MSFR in terms of utility, cell capacity, and outage conditions. I-MSFR and the simplified schemes have shown better performance than other schemes in the literature