Design of backtracking search optimization paradigm for joint amplitude-angle measurement of sources lying in fraunhofer zone

•Novel application of BSAs for effective estimation of amplitude and DOA parameters.•Performance verification of BSA variants for 2, 3 and 4 far field sources based model.•Viability of proposed BSA variants for both noiseless and noisy cases of the models.•Validation of the performance of BSA on Monte-Carlo simulations and their statistics. In this study, the strength of nature inspired computing (NIC) paradigm through backtracking search algorithms (BSA) is exploited for measurement of amplitude and direction of arrival (DOA) parameters of sources impinging on uniform linear array from Fraunhofer zone. The NIC techniques based on variant of BSAs are designed through varying the backtracking history and individual of the populations for effective optimization of the fitness evaluation function based on mean squared error between true and measured responses. Optimization mechanism of BSAs is applied for different degrees of freedom models of DOA from far field sources for noisy and noiseless environment. Comparative studies are conducted through outcomes of statistics based on multiple executions of each solver by means of different gauges of accuracy and complexity.