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.