A Novel Discrete Bacterial Foraging Algorithm and Its Application

—In order to solve discrete optimization problems, this paper proposed a discrete bacterial foraging algorithm (DBFA) based on the idea of bacterial foraging optimization (BFO). The proposed DBFA applies binary encoding, and thus has the advantages of solving both discrete and continuous optimization problems. Also, according to sharing experiences of bacterium, we use the rotation step to update velocities of bacteria and obtain its corresponding positions. Then we evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm through three classical benchmark functions and spectrum allocation problem of cognitive radio. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to some previous intelligence algorithms in both convergence rate and convergence accuracy.