The solar wind is often assumed to be composed of multiple components: the slow solar wind, the high-speed solar wind streams, the heliospheric current sheet, and the coronal mass ejections. In former times, these have often been treated as independent structures and their interactions have been neglected. Their interactions, however, have strong effects on the solar wind properties we see near Earth. I will shortly review our current knowledge on the solar wind sources, our understanding of their large-scale propagation in the inner heliosphere, how they interact with each other, how this shapes interplanetary space, and how this affects the solar wind properties we measure near Earth. I will conclude with a discussion on what parameters are missing to model the large-scale solar wind structure reliably, and which important open issues have to be solved in the near future.