In one embodiment, statistical information is collected relating to one or both of communication link quality or channel quality in a frequency-hopping network, in which packets are sent according to a frequency-hopping schedule that defines one or more timeslots, each timeslot corresponding to a transmission frequency. Also, a performance metric of a particular transmission frequency corresponding to a scheduled timeslot is predicted based on the collected statistical information. Based on the predicted performance metric, it is determined whether a transmitting node in the frequency-hopping network should transmit a packet during the scheduled timeslot using the particular transmission channel or wait until a subsequent timeslot to transmit the packet using another transmission frequency.