The rise of Internet of things technology, wireless communication and computer technology in recent years has attracted the scientific community's attention to wireless sensor networks, and the study of reasonable distribution coverage of detection areas. It is also necessary to maximize coverage.Artificial bee colony algorithm is a kind of optimization method which imitates the bee be- havior. It can obtain more superior convergence results for unconstrained numerical optimization problems. Because the existence of artificial bee colony algorithm is easy to be limited to the local optimal solution, the process of the intermediate stagnation problem, the need for a longer search time, an improved artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed, which can speed up the convergence speed in the later stage. The improved artificial bee colony algorithm can effectively reduce the redundancy and prolong the lifetime of the sensor network by optimizing the node coverage.