We propose a novel workload-dependent queuing model of a wireless router link which employs active queue management and is offered with a number of persistent TCP flows. As opposed to existing work that focus only on the average queue occupancy as the performance metric of interest, the proposed analytical method obtains the more informative steady-state queue occupancy distribution of the wireless link. With the intention of maximizing TCP throughput, this analytical method is used to study traffic agnostic link adaptation schemes with and without hybrid ARQ. Moreover, a novel cross-layer queue-aware link adaptation scheme is proposed to improve the TCP throughput relative to the case where adaptive modulation and coding decisions are made based solely on the physical layer parameters. A fixed-point analytical model is proposed to obtain the aggregate TCP throughput attained at wireless links employing active queue management and queue-aware link adaptation. Allowing packet retransmissions and generalizing the scope from a single link to a network of such links, we propose an energy efficient queue-aware link adaptation scheme with hybrid ARQ which jointly adapts the transmission power and rate of the wireless links based on the queue occupancy levels and the channel conditions. Furthermore, we provide a fixed-point analytical method for such networks.