Maximizing coverage and maintaining connectivity are two major objectives in designing and deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to obtain better sensor deployment in three-dimensional (3D) terrain in terms of coverage and connectivity. The proposed approach is based on a combination of the distributed particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm and a proposed 3D virtual force (VF) algorithm. The communication limit (CL) of the sensor nodes (SNs) is taken into consideration. A heuristic algorithm that is suitable for a limited communication environment is proposed to cluster the SNs. To effectively guide the SN deployment optimization and to speed up convergence, the addition of a VF term in the velocity update equation of each particle is adopted. To improve the efficiency of increase of coverage and connectivity of the WSN, the selected redundant sensor nodes (RSNs) move toward certain selected areas. In addition, measures are taken to guarantee population diversity in the early stage and the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm in a later stage. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, some comparative experiments are performed. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs well against other algorithms in deploying sensors in 3D terrain when considering CL.

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