Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are increasingly

becoming popular as low cost alternatives to wired network for

providing broadband access to users (the last mile connectivity).

In these multi-hop networks, data is forwarded to a gateway

from the nodes or from the gateway to the nodes. This paper

investigates the role of gateway placement on network throughput

for realistic confi gurations of WMNs. We show that the position

of the gateway signifi cantly bears on network throughput. It

is hence important to optimize its placement. Specifi cally, we

propose several heuristics to optimally position a single gateway

in WMN and compare their relative performance in terms of

network throughput with respect to the exact solution, which is

obtained through cumbersome computations.