Some wireless communication systems, such as mobile ad hoc network, operate on a limited battery supply, and energy efficiency is therefore crucial to the network survival time. This paper proposes a multiscale load adaptive scheduling (MLAS) scheme to determine the transmission time of the packets. In MLAS, traffic is predicted over the scale of time window, and then a transmission time stretching algorithm is proposed to adjust the packet transmission time packet by packet. Compared with the fixed transmission time scheme, MLAS can reduce the energy consumption of data transmission by up to 90% corresponding to the load factor and the burst characteristic. MLAS also outperforms the look ahead based scheme in the performance of energy efficiency with the same average delay.