After reinvestigating the meaning of manifold meshes, I have found my interpretation to be incorrect. My previous concept of a manifold mesh was a mesh which had no boundary edges (edges which are only attached to a face from one side). This however appears to be incorrect, A mesh is manifold if an edge is shared by either 1 or two faces. This means that I no longer have to worry about my mesh representation being able to support non-manifold meshs since while there inlusion would be nice, it is generally considered bad practice to create non-manifold meshes in the first place. Also various methods for LOD generation are only designed to work with manifold meshes.

As a result of this I intend on starting to implement the Half-Edge mesh representation today as it seems a nice balance between the complexity of implemenation and the connectivity performance benefits it can provide.