A Comparison of HEED Based Clustering Algorithms -- Introducing ER-HEED

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of distributed sensors with limited processing capabilities and energy restrictions. These unique attributes pose new challenges amongst which prolonging the WSN lifetime is one of the most important. Clustering is an energy efficient routing technique that has been widely applied to report data from the WSN nodes to a centralised Base Station. A plethora of different clustering protocols have been proposed. Some protocols are based on equal-sized clusters while others use clusters of unequal size. Some others make use of rotation techniques to reduce the amount of cluster head elections. When different clustering approaches are presented different simulation settings are used. In this paper we perform a comparison study of HEED based clustering protocols that are HEED, UHEED, RUHEED and a novel variation of R-HEED that is ER-HEED. We have considered the same network model, the same energy consumption model and we have compared the lifetime of the protocols by considering various case studies. Our comparison study shows that the selection of the protocol to be used depends on the case study and the WSN lifetime measure that is considered.