1) Chang, Chih-Yung, et al. "An obstacle-free and power-efficient deployment algorithm for wireless sensor networks." Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, IEEE Transactions on 39.4 (2009): 795-806.
2) Wang, You-Chiun, Chun-Chi Hu, and Yu-Chee Tseng. "Efficient deployment algorithms for ensuring coverage and connectivity of wireless sensor networks." Wireless Internet, 2005. Proceedings. First International Conference on. IEEE, 2005.
3) Chang, Chih-Yung, et al. "Obstacle-resistant deployment algorithms for wireless sensor networks." Vehicular Technology, IEEE Transactions on 58.6 (2009): 2925-2941.
4) Wang, Wei-Tong, and Kuo-Feng Ssu. "Obstacle detection and estimation in wireless sensor networks." Computer Networks 57.4 (2013): 858-868.
5) Tan, Haisheng, et al. "Arbitrary obstacles constrained full coverage in wireless sensor networks." Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 1-10.
One of the founding article about obstacles is due to Amit Jardosh and his colleagues: --> Amit Jardosh, Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer, Kevin C. Almeroth, and Subhash Suri. "Towards Realistic Mobility Models for Mobile Ad hoc Networks." In the Proceedings of MOBICOM, San Diego, CA, September 2003.
You can find his paper directly on its web page: http://moment.cs.ucsb.edu/~amitj/
You may also be interested by our paper (at least for the introduction, state-of-art and references): "Mean Degree of Ad Hoc networks in Environments with Obstacles" by Aboue-Nze Cédric, Guinand Frédéric and Pigné Yoann (published in the proceedings of WiMob 2012 and available on ResearchGate:
For increasing the network life time there are many papers available in the net. You cal also have a look at this paper co authored by me "Self Organized, Flexible, Latency and Energy Efficient Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks" in Springer publications .... and also our publication mentioned below available in Researchgate.
Hope it helps. All the best for the Research.
Conference Paper FAMACRO: Fuzzy and Ant Colony Optimization based MAC/Routing...