A wireless mesh network is configured as a multiple-level hierarchical network, with each level of the hierarchy having a plurality of nodes. Several clusters of nodes each acting as access points may be organized in numerous first-level meshes, with each of the first-level meshes being coupled to a second-level mesh having nodes that act as gateways to the first-level meshes. The number of nodes in each of the first-level and second-level meshes may be limited to a predetermined number of nodes during configuration in order to improve the performance of the mesh network.