Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN), a two-tier architecturebased onWireless Mesh Routers (WMR), has captured theinterest from bothacademia and industry, because of their ability toaccommodate bothWireless ISPs and user requirements. Despite thelarge amount ofresearch developed in this area, several issues stillneed to besolved. In this thesis we design an efficientsolution for multi-hopwireless networks providing the followingcontributions. First, wedesign and formalize Mesh Routing Strategy (MRS), across-layerrouting approach. MRS relies on simple heuristicsable to optimizetransmission power and route selection, resulting inimportantincrease of the transport capacity of the meshbackbone. Second, wedesign and implement MeshDV, a routing frameworkadapted to WMNs, which includes MRS and is also able to easily manage usermobility. Third, we develop MeshDVbox, a custom WMRbuilt usingoff-the-shelf components and deployed in ourlaboratory to realize aWMN test-bed.