The IEEE 802.11s standard specifies a mesh technology to be supported by IEEE 802.11 devices. Among the limitations caused by this heritage, we focus on the low scalability of the current IEEE 802.11s standard mechanisms. As a main contribution to the related research field, this article presents the DHT-based Cluster Routing Protocol (DCRP). DCRP addresses IEEE 802.11s' scalability issues by exploiting both Distributed Hash Tables and Clustering schemes, which have proved to be effective in scaling wireless (e.g., MANETs) and wired (e.g., P2P) networking systems. DCRP was implemented and compared with the HWMP through simulation for different scalability parameters and performance metrics. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme improves performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, throughput, and overhead.