Ant Colony Optimization for Social Utility Maximization in a Multiuser Communication System

Abstract

In a multiuser communication system such as cognitive radio or digital subscriber lines, the transmission rate of each user is affected by the channel background noise and the crosstalk interference from other users. This paper presents an efficient ant colony optimization algorithm to allocate each user’s limited power on different channels for maximizing social utility (i.e., the sum of all individual utilities). The proposed algorithm adopts an initial solution that allocates more power on the channel with a lower background noise level. Besides, the cooling concept of simulated annealing is integrated into the proposed method to improve the convergence rate during the local search of the ant colony optimization algorithm. A number of experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.