Starting all WMN nodes at the same time DWCP configures them circularly around the MGW and PGWs. At first all mesh routers in the direct neighborhood of a mesh gateway are configured. Next, the nodes in the neighborhood of the just configured mesh routers are configured, and so on. The WMN
would also configure itself if only mesh routers were used in the mesh backbone in addition to the MGW but this would take much more time than using additional mesh gateways. The more mesh gateways are used the faster the WMN configures.This results from the external connections of the mesh gateways.They can obtain a gateway address pool from the MGW over their external connection, and start to configure newly arriving nodes in their neighborhood. The two mesh gateway classes PGW and SGW differ in regard to the time they need to obtain the gateway address pool. A PGW is pre-configured with the external address of the MGW and hence it can instantly request a gateway address pool from the MGW. An SGW does not know the external address of the MGW. It has to wait until it receives an MGW advertisement which includes this address.To sum it up, PGWs speed up the autoconfiguration process at the expense of the additional pre-configuration effort.