This paper addresses the relay node placement problem in two-tiered wireless sensor networks with base stations, which aims to deploy a minimum number of relay nodes to achieve certain coverage and connectivity requirement. Under the assumption that the communication range of the sensor nodes is no more than that of the relay node, we present a polynomial time (5+ϵ)-approximation algorithm for the 1-coverage 1-connected problem. Furthermore, we consider the fault tolerant problem in the network, we present a polynomial time (20+ϵ)-approximation algorithm for the 2-coverage 2-connected problem, where ϵ is any given positive constant. For the k-coverage 2-connected situation, we present a polynomial time (15k−10+ϵ)-approximation algorithm.