Application of genetic algorithm to wireless communications

Abstract

Wireless communication is one of the most active areas of technology development of our time. Like all engineering endeavours, the subject of the wireless communication also brings with it a whole host of complex design issues, concerning network design, signal detection, interference cancellation, and resource allocation, to name a few. Many of these problems have little knowledge of the solution space or have very large search space, which are known as non-deterministic polynomial (NP) -hard or - complete and therefore intractable to solution using analytical approaches. Consequently, varied heuristic methods attempts have been made to solve them ranging from simple deterministic algorithms to complicated random-search methods. Genetic alcyorithm (GA) is an adaptive heuristic search algorithm premised on the evolutionary ideas of evolution and natural selection, which has been successfully applied to a variety of complicated problems arising from physics, engineering, biology, economy or sociology. Due to its outstanding search strength and high designable components, GA has attracted great interests even in the wireless domain. This dissertation is devoted to the application of GA to solve various difficult problems spotlighted from the wireless systems. These problems have been mathematically formulated in the constrained optimisation context, and the main work has been focused on developing the problem-specific GA approaches, which incorporate many modifications to the traditional GA in order to obtain enhanced performance. Comparative results lead to the conclusion that the proposed GA approaches are generally able to obtain the optimal or near-optimal solutions to the considered optimisation problems provided that the appropriate representation, suitable fitness function, and problem-specific operators are utilised. As a whole, the present work is largely original and should be of great interest to the design of practical GA approaches to solve realistic problems in the wireless communications systems.