In the WINSOC project, European and Indian researchers are applying principles learned from living organisms to design self-organizing networks of wireless sensors suitable for a wide range of environmental monitoring purposes,robust against node failures and capable of being implemented on large scales.

They developed mathematical models of biological systems and translated them into algorithms to determine how the sensor nodes should interact with each other, using self-organization. The sensor nodes communicate with their neighbors to arrive at a consensus on what has been sensed. The network then finds the best path through the available nodes to relay this information to the control centre.