An improved ant colony optimization for communication network routing problem

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a population-based meta-heuristic for combinatorial optimization problems such as communication network routing problem(CNRP). This paper proposes an improved ant colony optimization(IACO), which adapts a new strategy to update the increased pheromone, called ant-weight strategy, and a mutation operation, to solve CNRP. The simulation result for a benchmark problem is reported and compared to the simple ant colony optimization(ACO).