Abstract: Considering the self-organizing property of wireless sensor network (WSN), this paper proposes an improved adaptive distributive self-organizing algorithm for WSN based on the cellular automata (CA) mechanism. We consider the plentiful wireless sensor nodes as the cells in CA, each cell only needs to get the state information of its neighbors in the last moment, and implement state update with the same state conversion rule. The simulation results demonstrate that the energy consumption of the intensive-deployment WSN can be reduced greatly based on the proposed algorithm and the lifetime of the whole network can be prolonged in the condition of good connectivity and coverage.