A system and method are disclosed for forwarding data in hybrid wireless mesh networks. The method includes configuring a number of mesh network nodes as potential relay nodes (PRNs) in an overlay network associated with a hybrid wireless mesh network, streaming data packets from a source node to a destination node using a native data forwarding algorithm of the hybrid wireless mesh network, dynamically identifying relay nodes (RNs) among PRNs in the overlay network, creating secondary paths for sending data packets towards selected RNs in the overlay network, and relaying data packets from RNs to the destination node using the overlay network.