Aiming at the difficulty of deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs) on three-dimensional (3D) surfaces, based on the grey wolf optimizer (GWO), an enhanced version of the grey wolf optimizer is proposed for deploying WSNs on 3D surfaces, namely the enhanced grey wolf optimizer (EGWO), which is characterized by enhanced exploitation and exploration ability of the algorithm. The novelty of EGWO is that the grey wolf population is divided into two parts, one part is responsible for the outer-layer encircle and the other is responsible for the inner-layer encircle, and the introduction of Tent mapping. The purpose of this is to enhance the exploitation and exploration ability of the algorithm respectively, so as to improve the convergence and optimization precision of the algorithm. In addition, in terms of WSN deployment in 3D surfaces, this paper improves the means of determining the perceived blind zone. Meanwhile, a novel method to calculate the WSNs coverage area of simple and complex 3D surfaces is presented by combining the grid and integral of the 3D surfaces. The EGWO is favorably compared with the GWO and three existing variants of the grey wolf optimizer when testing on 12 well-known benchmark functions. The simulation experiment results show that compared with the existing algorithms, EGWO can provide a very competitive search result in terms of optimization precision and convergence performance. Finally, this paper applies EGWO to the 3D surface deployment of WSN. Simulations show that compared with the other three deployment algorithms, EGWO can improve the network coverage of WSN, which can save network deployment costs. In addition, the probability of network connectivity deployed by EGWO is higher, that is, EGWO can provide a better deployment solution. INDEX TERMS Wireless sensor network, three-dimensional surface deployment, perceived blind zone, grid and integration, optimization, grey wolf optimizer, inner-layer encircle.