Slime Mold Inspired Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The phenomenon of self-organization is pervasive in nature,where biological organisms efficiently self-organize unreliable and dynamically changing components to develop a wide diversity of functions. In addition, these biological organisms enjoy the desirable properties of robustness to the failure of individual components, adaptivity to changing conditions, and the lack of reliance on explicit central coordination. In this work, we seek inspiration from the study of the tubular network formation behavior of slime mold to design a localized protocol to connect sensors to sink(s) that balances efficiency and robustness in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the protocol, as well as the efficiency and robustness of the resulting network connectivity.