Electromagnetic Wave Propagation Modeling Using the Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

The Ant Colony Optimization algorithm - a multi-agent approach to combinatorial optimization problems - is introduced for a simple ray tracing performed on only an ordinary bitmap describing a two-dimensional scenario. This bitmap can be obtained as a simple scan where different colors represent different mediums or obstacles. It is shown that using the presented algorithm a path minimizing the wave traveling time can be found according to the Fermat's principle. An example of practical application is a simple ray tracing performed on only an ordinary scanned bitmap of the city map. Together with the Berg's recursive model a non-line-of-sight path loss could be calculated without any need of building database. In this way the coverage predictions for urban microcells could become extremely easy and fast to apply.