Abstract—Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) introduce a newparadigm of wireless broadband Internet access by providinghigh data rate service, scalability, and self-healing abilities atreduced cost. Obtaining high throughput for multi-castapplications (e.g. video streaming broadcast) in WMNs ischallenging due to the interference and the change of channelquality. To overcome this issue, cross-layer has been proposedto improve the performance of WMNs. Network coding is apowerful coding technique that has been proven to be the veryeffective in achieving the maximum multi-cast throughput. Inaddition to achieving the multi-cast throughput, network codingoffers other benefits such as load balancing and savesbandwidth consumption. This paper presents a review thefundamental concept types of medium access control (MAC)layer, routing protocols, cross-layer and network coding forwireless mesh networks. Finally, a list of directions for furtherresearch is considered.