[Babel-users] link costs

[Harald Geyer]

Hi!

One thing that I miss in the current implementation of babel is more
controll over link costs:

a) There are many cases where the automatic detection if an interface
is wireless fails. There is option -w which forces all interfaces to
be treated as wireless, but having some way to do this on an per interface
basis would be nice.

b) Currently the default costs 96 for wired links and 256 for ETX=1 links
are hardcoded into the program. In practice I want to set these costs on
a per interface basis too: The cost of sending a packet really depends
on the medium being used (say 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz) and on other parameters
like the antenna sending equally strong in all direction or sending
some very directed beam...

Of course the desired effect can often be achieved by 
in if ... metric ...
statements in /etc/babel.conf, but directly manipulating the link costs
seems more natural to me. Also one can't map the multiplicative 
nature of antenna gain issues to "in if ... metric ..." lines.

Harald