This invention relates to a rate-adaptive method for wireless mesh network in areas of wireless networking technology. In the invention, each node in the wireless mesh network broadcasts probe packets and meanwhile receives probe packets from its neighboring nodes, and maintains a rate priority table in time based on the sending success ratio of probe packets, and then sets up a new dynamic probe queue according to this rate priority table, selectively sending all the probes with rates that are listed in the rate priority table or close to them, and the automatic rate selection is accomplished by decisions on probes' sending success ratio. This invention can adapt to the changes of the network conditions very well, and reduce the influence of route broadcast and convergence on network throughput as much as possible, and at the meantime, it takes the changes in network topology into account, thus is very suitable for conditions with a complex spatial distribution of electromagnetic waves.