A system and method for managing congestion in a multi-hop wireless network, employing congestion notification messages. The technology has three main components: a mechanism at the Medium Access (MAC) layer for determining when a given source or transit node is deemed congested; a mechanism at the Network Layer (NL) determining how to propagate this information to applications, including suitably combining overload indications received from neighbors; and a mechanism at the Transport Layer (TL) of each source of traffic for determining when a source is generating excessive traffic, and combining it with Medium Access Control (MAC)-based overload indication from downstream nodes, thus providing a multi-layer approach to traffic throttling.