Angle of Arrival and Time of Flight Estimation as an Ising Energy Minimization Problem

This paper presents a ℓ
₀
-norm minimization based angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation approach using an Ising model (AIM). The proposed method takes advantage of the fact that incoming signals are spatially sparse and that the angular domain can be discretized. To solve the NP-hard problem, we formulate the ℓ
₀
norm minimization as an Ising energy minimization problem. The minimization of the Ising energy results in the maximization of the Gibbs distribution. The performance of the proposed method in identifying and resolving the angle of arrival of incoming signals is studied for different scenarios, in all of which the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.