This paper is presented in conjunction with, and forms the first part of, the paper entitled ldquoprokaryotic bio-inspired systems.rdquo In this part we propose and investigate a novel prokaryotic cell-based bio-inspired model suitable to implement self-healing bio-inspired systems. A key feature of our model is that system reliability can be increased with a minimal amount of hardware overhead. It also offers a bio-inspired compression/decompression technique that exploits the intimate relationship between different genes. Distributed DNA, highly dynamic and flexible routing resources and optimized self-repair characteristics (using Block and cell elimination) are some of the other advantages of the proposed model.