An electronic device may utilize or support adaptive traffic management in a resource-constrained network. The adaptive traffic management may comprise applying a multi-stage filtering to packets received by the electronic device, wherein each stage of the multi-stage filtering may comprises a validation check and a failure of any validation check of any stage when handling a packet terminates the handling of the packet. The adaptive traffic management may comprise apply an adaptive search function, whereby when the number of search responses received by the electronic device exceeds a particular maximum response threshold, one or more criteria for modifying search requests may be selected, to reduce number of expected search responses, and the modified search criteria may be applied to generated modified search command(s) that are applied in the search function.