Projecte final de carrera realitzat en col.laboració amb King's College LondonWireless Mesh Networks are expected to gain signi cant importance in the telecom-
munication market in the near future. Nevertheless, some critical factors menace
them not to achieve their expected features. In this thesis we focus our research on
the improvement of their performance. To face the multiple access issue we consider
the utilization of Spatial Time Division Multiple Access (STDMA). STDMA bene ts
from the spatial distribution of nodes allowing the reuse of timeslots by users su -
ciently far apart. This feature permits a better utilization of the spectrum, but arises
an NP-complete optimization problem consisting in distributing e ciently links into
timeslots. In the rst part of the thesis, we will address the link scheduling problem
and we will propose two heuristics to try to improve the overall performance of the
system. In the second part of the thesis, we will deal with directional antennas,
and in particular, with switched beam antennas. Several works have demonstrated
the signi cant bene ts of switched beam antennas applied to WMNs. This kind of
antennas are formed by several xed beam patterns that are switched according to
the communications requirements. Switching among patterns cause, though, a con-
sumption of energy and a lose of time to stabilize the patterns. A set of algorithms
to reduce the switchings without deteriorating the frame length achieved with the scheduling algorithms will be presente
