Abstract—The largest strength of contention-based MAC pro-tocols is simultaneously the largest weakness of their sched-uled counterparts: the ability to adapt to changes in network conditions. For scheduling to be competitive in mobile wireless networks, continuous adaptation must be addressed. We propose ATLAS, an Adaptive Topology- and Load-Aware Scheduling protocol to address this problem. In ATLAS, each node computes its persistence, the fraction of time it is permitted to transmit, in a topology and load dependent manner. A distributed auction piggybacks offers and claims onto existing network traffic to compute a lexicographic max-min channel allocation. A node’s persistence p is related to its allocation. Its schedule achieving p is updated where and when needed, without waiting for a frame boundary. We study how ATLAS adapts to controlled changes in topology and load. Our results show that ATLAS converges to most network changes in less than 0.1s, with about 20 % relative error, scaling with network size. We further study ATLAS in more dynamic networks and show that it keeps up with topology changes, and load changes sufficient for TCP to sustain multi-hop flows, a struggle in IEEE 802.11 networks. The predictable performance of ATLAS supports the design of higher-layer services that inform, and are informed by, the underlying communication network. Index Terms—Wireless networks, medium access control, adaptation. I.