Patent ID: 8085695

Claim:
An article comprising: a non-transitory machine accessible medium having a plurality of machine accessible instructions, wherein when the instructions are executed, the instructions provide for: establishing point-to-point communication utilizing a Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol over a secure out-of-band channel between a configured access point having a configuration server, and an unconfigured access point with the unconfigured access point automatically in response to introduction of the unconfigured access point into the wireless mesh network, wherein configuration provides network communication parameters to the unconfigured access point, wherein the secure out-of-band channel comprises a wired point-to-point connection directly between the unconfigured access point and the configured access point, wherein the parameters comprise one or more of a service set identifier (SSID), a channel number, and/or a transmit power level, wherein the access point provides network access to a user device and the unconfigured access point to provide network access to the user device in response to being configured, wherein automatically configuring the unconfigured access point comprises attempting to configure the unconfigured access point such that the access point may operate within the same wireless mesh network as the configured device by making a single request to the configuration server to configure the unconfigured access point that includes an action that allows for setting all the configuration data necessary to bootstrap the unconfigured access point into the wireless mesh network utilizing a variable list of parameters; discovering a configuration server running on the configured access point with the unconfigured access point via the secure out-of-band channel; utilizing the configuration server to automatically configure the unconfigured access point; and communicating over the wireless mesh network with the access point using configuration information from the configuration server.