Ant colony approach for optimum multiuser detector of MC-CDMA system

This paper introduces an application of the ant colony optimization (ACO) in the area of wireless communications. The application is designing and analyzing a low complexity optimum multiuser detector (MUD) utilizing ACO for multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system. The idea is to use artificial ants to keep track of promising areas of the search space by laying trails of pheromone which guides the search of the ACO, as a heuristic for choosing values to be assigned to variables. Simulations show that the algorithm converges to optimum MUD performance after small number of iterations. Results suggest that this algorithm reduces the computational complexity as much as 97% over an exhaustive search method.