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 configurations of WMNs. We show that the position
of the gateway significantly bears on network throughput. It
is hence important to optimize its placement. Specifically, 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