ABSTRACT
Advanced sensing technologies have enabled the wide use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in large-scale Outdoor Environment Monitoring (OEM). The most notable among these applications are those in harsh environments, such as forest fire and flood detection applications. This chapter proposes two Optimized Relay Placement (ORP) strategies with the objective of federating disjoint WSN sectors with the maximum connectivity under a cost constraint on the total number of Relay Nodes (RNs) to be deployed. It presents the scheme for federating disconnected WSN sectors with the purpose of maximizing algebraic connectivity. A WSN sector is a set of connected relaying nodes which is called as sector nodes (SNs). The exact location of each SN is assumed to be known in advance. Each WSN sector is represented using a virtual super single node (SSN). RNs deployed in the first phase are called First Phase RNs (FPRNs).
