A new importance-sampling ML estimator of time delays and angles of arrival in multipath environments

In this paper, the importance sampling (IS) concept is exploited for the first time in the context of maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of both the time delays and angles of arrival (AoAs) in multipath propagation environments. The global maximum of the compressed likelihood function (CLF) is found empirically with a low computational cost. Simulations suggest that the new IS-based ML-type estimator outperforms, in terms of accuracy, the main state-of-the-art techniques published on the topic. It is also able to reach the Cramér-Rao-lower bound (CRLB) [13] with few received samples.