In distributed wireless networks, where nodes actively participate in helping communication for other nodes, they are typically unaware of their neighourhood and hence have to "estimate" it before sending any useful data. In this paper, we formalize the concept of node neighbourhood by introducing the notion of network channel, in which all nodes become part of a large channel. The notion of network channel is then used to study routing in decode and forward networks. To do the same, we introduce the concept of network coherence time, which denotes the time for which the network topology remains approximately constant. The new concepts are used to study the tradeoffs between encoding rate of route discovery packets, number of discovered routes and accuracy of subsequent network channel estimation. Finally, we propose a simple adaptive algorithm for route selection using outage capacity as the metric for route selection, and show that our algorithm outperforms the existing route selection based on the minimum hop count.