Abstract—The access part of all cellular networks generation suffers from common issues related to dead spots (parts that are not covered by the network) and hot spots (parts where the number of users is huge compared to network resources). During the last eighteen years, lots of research proposals have tried to overcome cellular problems through MCN (multi-hop cellular networks) architectures which is a new paradigm allowing the extension of cellular access part via ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a survey of different MCN architectures. We identify the key MCN classification factors, we compare the proposed architectures with advantages and drawbacks of each one, and then we discuss some open issues related to this subject.