Abstract: Ant colony optimization (ACO) is a technique for optimization that was introduced in the early 1990’s. The inspiring source of ant colony optimization is the foraging behavior of real ant colonies. This behavior is exploited in artificial ant colonies for the search of approximate solutions to discrete and continuous optimization problems and to important problems in telecommunications, such as routing and load balancing. We proposed on some of the advancements occurring in the domain of ant colony optimization and provides a possible classification based on the developments that took place. The merits of the advanced ACO algorithms as well as their applications are also discussed.

Keywords: ACO, WSN, Pheromone, Optimal path, AACO.