  The deployment of the sensor nodes (SNs) always plays a decisive role in the
system performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this work, we propose
an optimal deployment method for practical heterogeneous WSNs which gives a
deep insight into the trade-off between the reliability and deployment cost.
Specifically, this work aims to provide the optimal deployment of SNs to
maximize the coverage degree and connection degree, and meanwhile minimize the
overall deployment cost. In addition, this work fully considers the
heterogeneity of SNs (i.e. differentiated sensing range and deployment cost)
and three-dimensional (3-D) deployment scenarios. This is a multi-objective
optimization problem, non-convex, multimodal and NP-hard. To solve it, we
develop a novel swarm-based multi-objective optimization algorithm, known as
the competitive multi-objective marine predators algorithm (CMOMPA) whose
performance is verified by comprehensive comparative experiments with ten other
stateof-the-art multi-objective optimization algorithms. The computational
results demonstrate that CMOMPA is superior to others in terms of convergence
and accuracy and shows excellent performance on multimodal multiobjective
optimization problems. Sufficient simulations are also conducted to evaluate
the effectiveness of the CMOMPA based optimal SNs deployment method. The
results show that the optimized deployment can balance the trade-off among
deployment cost, sensing reliability and network reliability. The source code
is available on https://github.com/iNet-WZU/CMOMPA.
