A buffer overflow notification protocol, to effectively control buffer over
flow at the link level in wireless ad hoc networks, is proposed. The protoc
ol allows a congested node to have a higher transmission priority so as to
access a shared medium by the dynamic adjustment of the contention window o
f the node and its neighbouring nodes. The protocol is evaluated using a Gl
oMoSim simulator. Simulation results show that the protocol achieves 10-20%
improvement of throughput, and immediately and efficiently reduces the pac
ket drops due to buffer overflow at intermediate nodes on the transmission
path.