Dynamic Load Balancing Using an Ant Colony Approach in Micro-cellular Mobile Communications Systems

Abstract This chapter uses an ant colony meta-heuristic to optimally load balance code division multiple access micro-cellular mobile communication systems. Load balancing is achieved by assigning each micro-cell to a sector. The cost function considers handoff cost and blocked calls cost, while the sectorization must meet a minimum level of compactness. The problem is formulated as a routing problem where the route of a single ant creates a sector of microcells. There is an ant for each sector in the system, multiple ants comprise a colony and multiple colonies operate to find the sectorization with the lowest cost. It is shown that the method is effective and highly reliable, and is computationally practical even for large problems.