Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide an important means of monitoring the physical world, but their limitations present
challenges to fundamental network services such as routing. In this work we utilize an abstraction of WSNs based on the theory
of identifying codes. This abstraction has been useful in recent literature for a number of important monitoring problems,
such as localization and contamination detection. In our case, we use it to provide a joint infrastructure for efficient and
robust monitoring and routing in WSNs. Specifically, we make use of efficient and distributed algorithm for generating robust
identifying codes, an NP-hard problem, with a logarithmic performance guarantee based on a reduction to the set
k-multicover problem. We also show how this same identifying-code infrastructure provides a natural labeling that can be used
for near-optimal routing with very small routing tables. We provide experimental results for various topologies that illustrate
the superior performance of our approximation algorithms over previous identifying code heuristics.
Keywords robust identifying codes - distributed algorithms - routing - sensor networks