A system and method for characterizing the quality of a link, in
particular, a bi-directional link, between nodes in a wireless
communication network, such as a wireless ad-hoc peer-to-peer network,
with minimum network overhead. The system and method determine the
quality of link between two nodes by taking into consideration the view
from both the nodes, and factors such as signal strength, signal-to-noise
ratio or any statistic collected at the physical layer that is deemed
representative of the quality of a link. The link quality can also be
adjusted using a weighting factor.