Aiming at the problems of low coverage and high communication cost for wireless sensor deployment, an Improved Heuristic Ant Colony Algorithm (IHACA) merging Chaos optimization of padded Sensor Placements at Informative and cost-Effective Locations algorithm (IHACA-CpSPIEL) method for sensor deployment was proposed. Firstly, the correlation between observation points and unobserved points was established by mutual information, and the communication cost was described in the form of graph theory to establish the mathematical model with submodularity. Secondly, chaos operator was introduced to improve the global searching ability of pSPIEL (padded Sensor Placements at Informative and cost-Effective Locations) algorithm for local parameters, and then the optimal number of clusters was found. Then, the factors of the colony distance heuristic function and the pheromone updating mechanism were changed to jump out of the local solution of communication cost. Finally, Chaos optimization of pSPIEL algorithm (CpSPIEL) was integrated with the IHACA to determine the shortest path, so as to achieve the purpose of low-cost deployment. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can jump out of the local optimal solution well, and the communication cost is reduced by 6.5% to 24.0% compared with the pSPIEL algorithm, and has a faster search speed.