Recently, cooperative and distributed processing has been attracted a lot of attention, especially in wireless sensor
networks, to prolong the network’s lifetime. So, distributed adaptive filtering, which operates in a distributed and adaptive
manner, has been established. In the distributed adaptive networks, in addition to filter coefficients, the length of the
adaptive filter is also unknown in general, and it should be estimated. The distributed incremental fractional tap-length (FT)
algorithm is an approach to determine the adaptive filter length in a distributed scheme. In the current study, we analyze the
steady-state behavior of the distributed incremental variable FT LMS algorithm. According to the analysis, we derive the
mathematical expression for the steady-state tap-length at each particular sensor. The obtained results indicate that this
algorithm overestimates optimal tap-length. Numerical simulations are provided to confirm the theoretical analyses.