SLIMEER: A Bio-inspired Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol with Self-Healing Fault Tolerance for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Fault tolerance and energy efficiency are two of the most critical design imperatives in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Conventional routing protocols such as AODV, DSR, and DSDV rely on pre-established paths and reactive repair mechanisms that incur high latency and energy overhead when nodes fail. In this paper, we propose SLIMEER, a novel bio-inspired routing protocol modelled on the network growth behaviour of the Slime Mold Physarum Polycephalum. In the biological system, tubular conduits carrying higher flux progressively thicken while low-traffic tubes thin and eventually dissolve which is a self-organising process that produces shortest-path, fault-resilient networks with no centralised control. SLIMEER translates this mechanism into a distributed routing protocol where virtual tube conductance values are maintained at each node and updated using a discrete-time Physarum dynamics equation. Nodes that carry more traffic reinforce their routing entries; tubes along failed or congested paths decay through an evaporation mechanism, causing traffic to naturally redistribute around failures. Simulation results obtained using NS-3 across varying network sizes confirm that SLIMEER consistently delivers higher reliability, lower latency, longer network lifetime, and greater energy savings than both classical and bio-inspired routing baselines, demonstrating that slime mold-inspired conductance dynamics offer a compelling foundation for fault-tolerant WSN routing.