In this paper, we study topology control methods aiming at achieving high throughput for wireless mesh networks. Based on the analysis of the existing topology control methods, such as the shortest path tree method, the load balancing method and the greedy method, we propose a relative-closest connect-first topology control algorithm. In our proposed method, each node has a distance vector to keep the hop-distance to all gateway nodes, one component for each gateway. A node that has a closest relative distance to a gateway has the highest priority to be connected to the subtree rooted from the gateway. Our proposed topology control method combines the merits of the shortest path tree, the load balancing and the greedy methods. We also present a distributed implementation of the proposed topology control method. Simulation results have shown our proposed method achieves better performance than the existing methods under various distributions of nodes and gateways, and the distributed method achieves a similar performance to the centralized one.