P-iRP: Physarum-Inspired Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

There is a trade-off between routing efficiency and energy equilibrium for sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Inspired by the large and single-celled amoeboid organism-slime mold physarum polycephalum, this paper presents a novel physarum-inspired routing protocol (P-iRP) for WSNs to address the above issue. In P-iRP, a sensor node selects its proper next hop by using a proposed physarum-inspired selecting next hop model (PSN), which considers comprehensively the distance, energy residue and location of the next hop. We introduce the PSN´s routing selecting strategy and detail PiRP´s algorithms. Simulation results show how P-iRP can achieve the effective trade-off between routing efficiency and energy equilibrium compared to existing classical algorithms.