Heuristic Ant Colony Optimization with Applications in Communication Systems

This work explores the heuristic optimization algorithm based on ant colonies (ACO), deployed on complex optimization problems, aiming to achieve an iterative and feasible method which is able to solve NP and NP-Hard problems related to wireless networks. Furthermore, the convergence and performance of the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm for continuous domains are addressed through dozens of benchmark functions, which in turn, differ on each other regarding the number of dimensions and the difficulty w.r.t. the optimization (number of local optima). Finally, the applicability of the ACO is depicted in an minimum power control problem for CDMA networks.