Acoustic echo cancellation with the

NLMS algorithm
The first go-to algorithm for acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) is a the gradient descent
least mean squared (LMS) algorithm. The LMS algorithm however has a challenge in the
convergence time making it not quite suitable for real time operating system which
require fast convergence of the algorithm with low computation time. An adaptation of
the LMS algorithm, the normalized LMS algorithm is used to mitigate this
challenge. Consider the LMS algorithm which proceeds as:

Figure 1: Single line AEC architecture

where are the filter taps being estimated, , is

additive noise and is the descent parameter. The NLMS seeks to optimize the choice
of the value of used. The square of the error signal, given as is

minimized for the optimal value such that the constraint .

A new cost function thus arises, given by

which leads to
Further, the partials with respect to the Lagrange multipliers are

Thus the complete solution will proceed as:

The NLMS update equation looks similar to the original LMS update equation

with . In most cases, a small constant is included for a more

graceful descent of the algorithm and also to satisfy the Wolfe conditions. A sample
result for this algorithm is shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Performance of NLMS AEC

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