Technologies are described herein for dynamically determining and assigning parent nodes and routes for nodes in a mesh network. A host sends a command message to one or more nodes of the mesh network. The command message is configured to cause the nodes to collect communication parameters regarding neighboring nodes and to upload neighbor lists containing the communication parameters regarding the neighboring nodes to the host. The host then calculates a link score for the pairs of neighboring nodes in the mesh network based on the communication parameters in the uploaded neighbor lists and assigns one or more parent nodes to at least one of the nodes based on the calculated link scores. The host then sends a command message to the node causing the node to reconfigure based on the command message and begin communicating through the newly assigned one or more parent nodes.