How to measure connection quality between to arbitrary mesh node on a BATMAN mesh

I'm building a set of portable OpenWRT nodes which create a mesh via BATMAN-IV. A central router is used to monitor the network and collect information that can be displayed on a tablet. The idea is that you can quickly use this setup to build a mesh-network-to-go wherever you want.
This is working quite well already, but when a user now places those nodes, he/she needs some kind of feedback on the mesh quality. Precisely, the node needs to indicate to the user

  • is it still connected to the mesh at all?
  • does it still have a good connection to the central node?

Should any of those not be true, the user knows that the node has to be placed closer to the last one.

So, my question is: How can a node measure the quality of it's connection to another node (the central router in this case) in a meaningful way that can be displayed to a user?

What I've found so far:

  1. You can get the attenuation (signal) of the network adapter using iw dev <mesh-interface> station dump. That's a good quality indicator, but it only measures the link quality to the next node, not through the mesh to the central router.
root@OpenWrt:~# iw dev if-mesh station dump
	Station dc:4e:f4:0a:4a:64 (on if-mesh)
		inactive time:	64 ms
		rx bytes:	13306109
		rx packets:	129950
		tx bytes:	170941244
		tx packets:	130887
		tx retries:	126146
		tx failed:	8578
		rx drop misc:	990
		signal:  	-34 dBm
		signal avg:	-32 dBm
		Toffset:	18446744070017047128 us
		tx bitrate:	86.7 MBit/s MCS 12 short GI
		tx duration:	0 us
		rx bitrate:	86.7 MBit/s MCS 12 short GI
		rx duration:	0 us
		expected throughput:	37.536Mbps
		mesh llid:	54040
		mesh plid:	61489
		mesh plink:	ESTAB
		mesh airtime link metric: 213
		mesh connected to gate:	no
		mesh connected to auth server:	no
		mesh local PS mode:	ACTIVE
		mesh peer PS mode:	ACTIVE
		mesh non-peer PS mode:	ACTIVE
		authorized:	yes
		authenticated:	yes
		associated:	yes
		preamble:	long
		WMM/WME:	yes
		MFP:		no
		TDLS peer:	no
		DTIM period:	2
		beacon interval:100
		short slot time:yes
		connected time:	6124 seconds
		associated at [boottime]:	169.367s
		associated at:	1643892934015 ms
		current time:	1643899057675 ms
  1. Using batadv-vis -f jsondoc, you can get a structure of the whole mesh, where every node is annotated with an internal metric value that describes the connection quality between it an the querying node. This is basically what I want, but the metric values behave a little odd sometimes, jumping to bad values while the actual connection quality is still good.
	root@OpenWrt:~# batadv-vis -f jsondoc
	{
	  "source_version" : "2021.1-openwrt-1",
	  "algorithm" : 4,
	  "vis" : [
	    { "primary" : "dc:4e:f4:0a:4a:64",
	      "neighbors" : [
		 { "router" : "dc:4e:f4:0a:4a:64",
		   "neighbor" : "dc:4e:f4:0a:3e:eb",
		   "metric" : "1.143" }
	      ],
	      "clients" : [
		"ee:47:c3:2d:41:5b",
		"8c:83:e1:81:e1:70",
		"dc:4e:f4:0a:4a:65",
		"3c:dc:bc:cd:30:db",
		"ee:47:c3:2d:41:5b",
		"ee:47:c3:2d:41:5b"
	      ]
	    },
	    { "primary" : "dc:4e:f4:0a:3e:eb",
	      "neighbors" : [
		 { "router" : "dc:4e:f4:0a:3e:eb",
		   "neighbor" : "dc:4e:f4:0a:4a:64",
		   "metric" : "1.016" }
	      ],
	      "clients" : [
		"c2:c6:8f:55:eb:49",
		"c2:c6:8f:55:eb:49",
		"c2:c6:8f:55:eb:49"
	      ]
	    }
	  ]
	}
  1. With batctl tp <MAC>, you can run a throughput test to another node. Unfortunately, this works by just sending data over as fast as possible and then calculate throughput by time and data sent. This floods the connection completely and cannot be done every x seconds to display a new measurement to the user.

I'm running BATMAN-IV on OpenWrt 21.02.0. The portable routers are equipped with a multi colored indicator led and a small OLED display, so displaying any kind of information is not an issue.