Nodes in an 802.11s network will automatically advertise their profile and mesh capabilities in beacons, and discover and associate with their neighbors. In a sense, a mesh is an extended series of these neighborhood associations, which together work to select the optimal path for forwarding data.

One early experimenter with the developing 802.11s standard has been the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which is working to create a simple, inexpensive, networked notebook that can be built and distributed in the millions to students in developing countries. With 802.11s, these laptops can automatically create their own infrastructure in a village or a cluster of nearby homes, hopping to whatever broadband or Internet connection might be available. In a 2007 experiment in Australia, an OLPC volunteer used the project's mesh to reach just over one mile with a series of wireless hops.

The 802.11s mesh standard will use the WLAN security features in the 802.11i standard, but is adding some extensions of its own, to ensure end-to-end data security over multiple radio hops. Other features will address how mesh nodes authenticate themselves to each other. The OLPC Web site has a section devoted to some of the mesh security issues, which may be resolved with the final IEEE standard.