With increasing applications of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology, reliability requirements for the deployment of RFID readers have become more critical. For a robust deployment of a RFID network, a systematic solution was proposed in this paper. To simplify the reader deployment problem, instead of the traditional 2D circle-like shape assumption, the ellipse/ellipsoid-like shape was taken to represent the signal range of an RFID antenna in this paper. Further, the performance of RFID was estimated statistically. In addition, a deployment tool was designed for users to obtain a recommended layout. For a given area, solutions of number and placement of RFID readers are computed fast and robustly. To avoid reader collision which may result in low efficiency of a RFID network, two simplified mechanisms were proposed. Finally, the practical implementation and simulations were performed to test the practicability of the deployment tool and further to confirm the robustness and adequacy of the proposed models.