Abstract. In ad hoc sensor networks, sensor nodes have very limited energy resources, thus energy consuming operations such as data collection, transmission and reception must be kept at a minimum. This paper applies particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach to optimize the coverage in ad hoc sensor networks deployment and to reduce cost by clustering method based on a wellknown energy model. Sensor nodes are assumed to be mobile, and during the coverage optimization process, they move to form a uniformly distributed topology according to the execution of algorithm at base station. The simulation results show that PSO algorithm has faster convergence rate than genetic algorithm based method while demonstrating good performance 1 .