Link Lifetime calculation at routing layer

[Hassam Mughal]

Greetings Everyone!

I am trying to calculate link lifetime when two or more wifi nodes are connected at the routing layer using the default routing protocols i.e. static and global.

Is it feasible to modify the ipv4-global routing and ipv4-static routing classes to do this? Or do I need to extend these classes and build my own routing protocol?

The issue that I am facing is, I am using multiple wireless interfaces and net devices on a single node. When I am installing the default InternetStackHelper on these nodes, the packets are sent and delivered at the exact interfaces such as 10.1.2.1 --> 10.1.2.2 and 10.1.1.1 --> 10.1.1.2. But when I install DSDV routing protocol, the packets are received by another interface for instance 10.1.2.1 ---> 10.1.1.1.

Which I think is due to the multi-hop nature of DSDV. So, I decided not to modify DsdvRoutingProtocol class and use the default InternetStackHelper with global/static routing. However, to implement the link lifetime calculation, I need to monitor the time the two nodes are connected to each other. I am stuck at the moment and need some guidelines or hint to do this. 

Any help or guidance in this regard will be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance