An improved ant colony optimization for the communication network routing problem

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