In a wireless network environment, techniques for traffic load management and transmission retry management assist a node to regulate network bandwidth consumed by one or more applications operating on the node, and assist the node to retransmit failed packets. Each of several software applications operating on the node may be prioritized. The prioritized applications will each receive a contention window appropriate to the priority of the application, which enforces an amount of bandwidth available to the application. In the event that a packet sent by the node fails to be acknowledged by a recipient, a retry algorithm may be utilized. The retry algorithm may use input including link quality and traffic density to adjust or maintain the contention window and/or retry count.