A system and method for adaptively managing frame size in a wireless multihop network (100) is disclosed. In one embodiment, a packet is transmitted from a source to a destination (420). A acknowledgement packet (422) is received and a successful acknowledgement packet counter is incremented if the acknowledgement packet arrives prior to a time-out of a timer (444). A frame size is increased if the successful acknowledgement packet counter reaches a specified value (446, 448). If the acknowledgement packet arrives after the time-out of the timer, the successful acknowledgement packet counter (460) is reset and the frame size (462) is decreased. These procedures can be repeated until the frame size is greater than or equal to a maximum frame size (450) or less than or equal to a minimum frame size (464).