On performance bounds for an affine combination of two LMS adaptive filters

This paper studies the statistical behavior of an affine combination of the outputs of two LMS adaptive filters that simultaneously adapt using the same white Gaussian input. The purpose of the combination is to obtain an LMS adaptive filter with fast convergence and small steady-state mean-square error (MSE). The linear combination studied is a generalization of the convex combination, in which the combination factor is restricted to the interval (0,1). The viewpoint is taken that each of the two filters produces dependent estimates of the unknown channel. Thus, there exists a sequence of optimal affine combining coefficients which minimizes the MSE. The optimal unrealizable affine combiner is studied and provides the best possible performance for this class. Then, a new scheme is proposed for practical applications. It is shown that the practical scheme yields close-to-optimal performance when properly designed (as suggested by the theoretical optimal).