Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have been widely considered as an effective tool for monitoring our environment and bridging physical world with digital world. One critical issue in wide adoption of wireless sensor solutions is the deployment of the wireless sensor nodes. The wireless signals of the sensor nodes are often affected by the environment and are very unpredictable, which make the deployment very difficult. Previous works on sensor deployment tend to be theoretical, using idealized assumptions such as identical and perfect radio coverage. They do not take practical factors in real environments into consideration, such as walls, furniture, radio interference, etc. Theses factors make it difficult to derive a usable environmental model for those deployment algorithms to work properly. In this thesis, we introduce a deployment tool for deploying wireless sensor networks, assuming an environment that is difficult to model. Our objective is to develop an easy-to-follow procedure to deploy sensor networks while using as few sensors as possible. Given a set of sensors already deployed at target locations for collecting the data, the tool follows an interactive process to help the users to determine where to deploy relay nodes in order to link all the sensors back to the sink. The capability of the tool is demonstrated by a case study for deploying sensors in an office building.