1.IntroductionIn the current telecommunication scenario, companies must deal with spectrum scarcity, power consumption issues, increasing throughput demand, and quality of service (QoS) requirements, including high performance (in terms of bit error rate (BER)) with guarantees of delivering the target information rate per user-class, maximum allowed delay, and so on. In these situations, many optimization problems arise, such as multiuser detection and resource allocation. A lot of innovative algorithms conception and research efforts have been spent in order to satisfy the new services requirements, such as growing capacity, availability, mobility, and multiclass services (i.e., multirate users) with different quality of service (QoS). Hence, inspired by this scenario, a different optimization approach based on heuristic procedures has been investigated. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) was developed after some researchers have analyzed the birds behavior and discerning that the advantage obtained through their group life could be explored as a tool for a heuristic search. Considering this new concept of interaction among individuals, J. Kennedy and R. Eberhart developed a new heuristic search based on a particle swarm Kennedy & Eberhart (1995). The PSO principle is the movement of a group of particles, randomly distributed in the search space, each one with its own position and velocity. The position of each particle is modified by the application of velocity in order to reach a better performance. The interaction among particles is inserted in the calculation of particle velocity. In a multiple access DS/CDMA system, a conventional detector by itself may not provide a desirable performance and quality of service, once the system capacity is strongly affected by multiple access interference (MAI). The capacity of a DS/CDMA system in multipath channels is limited mainly by the MAI, self-interference (SI), near-far effect (NFR) and fading. The conventional receiver for multipath channels (Rake receiver) explores the path diversity in order to reduce fading impairment; however, it is not able to mitigate neither the MAI nor the near-far effect Moshavi (1996);Verdú (1998). In this context, multiuser detection (MUD) emerged as a solution to overcome the MAI. The best performance is acquired by the optimum multiuser detection (OMUD), which is based on the log-likelihood function (LLF), but results