International audienceIn many applications such as precision agriculture (fruit tree plantation, olive groves) or environmental monitoring, wireless sensors are, very often, randomly scattered in the 3D area of interest. Such applications require full three-dimensional coverage. Undoubtedly, an initial random deployment does not achieve neither full coverage of the 3D area of interest, nor network connectivity. Thus, a redeployment algorithm has to be introduced in order to ensure these two goals. Our contribution is the design of 3D-DVFA, a distributed deployment algorithm based on virtual forces in three dimensional wireless sensor networks where sensor nodes are assumed to be mobile and autonomous

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Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in a wide range of applications due to their monitoring and tracking abilities. Depending on the applications goals, sensor nodes are deployed either in a two dimensional (2D) area or in a threedimensional (3D) area. In addition, WSN deployment can be either in a distributed or a centralized manner. In this paper, we are interested in a fully distributed deployment of WSN in several 3D-flat-surface configurations using autonomous and mobile nodes. Our goal is to ensure full 3D flat surfaces coverage and maintain network connectivity for these surfaces. To reach our goal we propose 3D-DVFA-FSC, a distributed deployment algorithm based on virtual forces strategy to move sensor nodes over different 3D-flat-surface shapes. Simulation results show that 3D-DVFA-FSC provides a full coverage rate regardless of the 3D-flat-surface configuration while maintaining network connectivity.