Recently, several studies have analyzed the statistical properties of low power wireless links in real environments, clearly demonstrating the differences between experimentally observed communication properties and widely used simulation models. However, these studies have not performed in depth analysis of the temporal properties of wireless links. Our first goal is to study the statistical temporal properties of links in low power wireless communications. We study short term temporal issues, like links lagged autocorrelation, lagged correlation of reverse links, and consecutive same path links. We also study long term temporal aspects, gaining insight on the length of time and how often we should measured the channel and update our models. Our second objective is to explore how statistical temporal properties impact routing protocols. We have developed two new routing algorithms for the cost link model: a generalized Dijkstra algorithm with centralized execution, and a localized distributed probabilistic algorithm.