Quantum bacterial foraging optimization for cognitive radio spectrum allocation

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel swarm intelligence optimization method which integrates bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) with quantum computing, called quantum bacterial foraging optimization (QBFO) algorithm. In QBFO, a multi-qubit which can represent a linear superposition of states in search space probabilistically is used to represent a bacterium, so that the quantum bacteria representation has a better characteristic of population diversity. A quantum rotation gate is designed to simulate the chemotactic step for the sake of driving the bacteria toward better solutions. Several tests are conducted based on benchmark functions including multi-peak function to evaluate optimization performance of the proposed algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed QBFO has more powerful properties in terms of convergence rate, stability and the ability of searching for the global optimal solution than the original BFO and quantum genetic algorithm. Furthermore, we examine the employment of our proposed QBFO for cognitive radio spectrum allocation. The results indicate that the proposed QBFO based spectrum allocation scheme achieves high efficiency of spectrum usage and improves the transmission performance of secondary users, as compared to color sensitive graph coloring algorithm and quantum genetic algorithm.