## 1 Introduction  
In wireless communication, low-cost miniaturized devices that can be used for monitoring in a number of diverse applications have been introduced [1]. These devices are equipped with one or more sensors to detect, for example, humidity, light, sound, or temperature, and are called wireless sensor nodes. Wireless sensor nodes can also communicate with each other in an autonomous manner. Multiple wireless sensor nodes--which are extremely small and have limited battery power, communication bandwidth, and storage space--can be deployed in a particular region to form a wireless sensor network (WSN) in an _ad hoc_ manner. The wireless sensor nodes fetch the required data and transfer it hop by hop securely from the source to a single or multiple destinations [2], as shown in Figure 1. In a WSN, the destination (e.g., the sink node or gateway) can be either single or multiple and either static or mobile depending on the requirements of the application scenario. Routing strategies and WSN modeling have recently received a great deal of attention. The security issues associated with WSNs require strong attack-repelling mechanisms coupled with subsequent verification [3; 4; 5]. Numerous security strategies are available, such as DTRAB [6] and ReTrust [7], as well as other types of communication mechanisms and solutions that also include single-hop communication as proposed in [8; 9; 10; 11]. However, these strategies are completely infeasible and inapplicable in the case of large-scale WSNs. Many of the data-routing protocols used in WSNs are simple, making them more vulnerable to widespread attacks [12]. In such a WSN, an adversary can deploy his own node(s) to generate several types of attacks for denial of service (DOS) or to compromise existing nodes. Through these compromised nodes, the adversary can perform network-layer attacks, which predominantly involve the manipulation of important data. Attacks that attempt to manipulate data can be categorized into two classes: in the first, the attacker attempts to influence the user data directly, and in the second, the attacker attempts to affect the core data-routing topology. It is important to focus on the security requirements throughout the initiation and implementation of a WSN design [13]. In the complete lifespan of a WSN, the initialization phase is critical and requires efficient and active security measures. When nodes are deployed, they must acquire and/or build information regarding their neighboring nodes and the environment to enable them to communicate and transfer data to the destination [14]. Communications in a WSN are vulnerable to massive attacks, particularly when the wireless sensor nodes are deployed in hostile environments, because sensor nodes are limited in terms of resources such as battery power, processing speed, signal strength, and storage space. The possible types of attacks on WSN communications include spoofing, tampering, eavesdropping and signal jamming, replaying or altering routing information, wormhole attacks, resource exhaustion, selective forwarding, Sybil attacks, flooding attacks, sinkhole attacks, and even unknown attacks [15; 16; 17]. Researchers have proposed mechanisms that are mostly dependent on secure authentication and encryption [18] to thwart attacks, but data confidentiality remains a challenge [4; 19]. Figure 1: Illustration of a secure WSNs. In many aspects of technology, nature has provided inspiration for many solutions. For example, [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] [20; 21] proposed the application of biological self-organization methods to network data using primary engineering applications [22].