Multi-colony bacteria foraging optimization with cell-to-cell communication for RFID network planning

In order to obtain accurate and reliable network planning in the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) communication system, the locations of readers and the associated values for each of the reader parameters have to be determined. All these choices must optimize a set of objectives, such as tag coverage, economic efficiency, load balance, and interference level between readers. This paper proposes a novel optimization algorithm, namely the multi-colony bacteria foraging optimization (MC-BFO), to solve complex RFID network planning problem. The main idea of MC-BFO is to extend the single population bacterial foraging algorithm to the interacting multi-colony model by relating the chemotactic behavior of single bacterial cell to the cell-to-cell communication of bacterial community. With this multi-colony cooperative approach, a suitable diversity in the whole bacterial community can be maintained. At the same time, the cell-to-cell communication mechanism significantly speeds up the bacterial community to converge to the global optimum. Then a mathematical model for planning RFID networks is developed based on the proposed MC-BFO. The performance of MC-BFO is compared to both GA and PSO on RFID network planning problem, demonstrating its superiority.