According to an embodiment of the invention, there is disclosed a method of operating a wireless mesh network. The method comprises: seeding the network from a first node; allocating a network address to each member node of the network to form a tree-like structure of the nodes, such that the network address is reversibly derived from the network address of the member node from which it is derived in the tree-like structure; and mapping out cross-branch network connections between nodes that are determined not to be immediate neighbour nodes according to the addresses of the tree-like structure. Further related system embodiments are also disclosed.