  Adaptive networks consist of a collection of nodes with adaptation and
learning abilities. The nodes interact with each other on a local level and
diffuse information across the network to solve estimation and inference tasks
in a distributed manner. In this work, we compare the mean-square performance
of two main strategies for distributed estimation over networks: consensus
strategies and diffusion strategies. The analysis in the paper confirms that
under constant step-sizes, diffusion strategies allow information to diffuse
more thoroughly through the network and this property has a favorable effect on
the evolution of the network: diffusion networks are shown to converge faster
and reach lower mean-square deviation than consensus networks, and their
mean-square stability is insensitive to the choice of the combination weights.
In contrast, and surprisingly, it is shown that consensus networks can become
unstable even if all the individual nodes are stable and able to solve the
estimation task on their own. When this occurs, cooperation over the network
leads to a catastrophic failure of the estimation task. This phenomenon does
not occur for diffusion networks: we show that stability of the individual
nodes always ensures stability of the diffusion network irrespective of the
combination topology. Simulation results support the theoretical findings.
