I'm a Ph.D Student and I'm researching a Service Centric Networking architecture with resourceallocation on a large scale.

What I'm looking to do is expand an existing routing protocol like OSPF with extra fields and some new message types that I need for communication between Nodes. I want to manipulate the cost of a network link and I want paths to be calculated like in OSPF V2/v3, but using the cost that my algorithms have calculated.

What I have
I have the source code of OSPF from Quagga. I am assuming I can edit this code how I want, including packet structures and creating new types. Yes, I am aware it won't be easy but this is a 6 years research project and I am eager to develop something new, to move forward.

What I need
I would like to know how I can deploy the edited OSPF source files I have (written in C) on any type of server. I have a large testbed environment available with hundreds of virtual nodes and pretty much any OS out there.

So if I want to test my extended protocol, how do I make all the nodes in a network use this to communicate? I do not understand what parts of the kernel I need to edit here. I tried searching for days now and I am unable to find how to deploy a non-existing routing protocol, without the use of an application-level framework. If somebody could push me in the right direction that'd be awesome.

note: I need this to be a routingprotocol and not an application, since I want this to work on op of the network layer for performance reasons.

Thanks!