Abstract.With the scientific and technological progress, new-style three-dimensional (3D) mobile sensor networks draw the attention of many exciting applications in multifarious areas, where the former twodimensional (2D) assumptions do not make sense. Existing references were mostly restricted to 3D static sensor networks, featuring either random or deterministic, while basing on more realistic mobile conditions, the studies were rarely referred. In this paper, we, for the first time, apply the noted virtual force algorithm (VFA) to 3D space. Except for traditional virtual forces, central gravitation and equilibrium force are additionally introduced to get better sensor distribution. Then four groups of cases are presented to summarize various mobility patterns and two metrics are of particular interest to evaluate the performance of our proposed improvement, namely coverage ratio and homogeneous degree. The simulation witnesses the effectiveness of the improved mechanism in the end.
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