Rate-based congestion/flow control is a promising way to achieve high throughput in high speed packet-switching networks. We consider a rate-based congestion control to aim at obtaining high throughput and fair sharing of the communication resources. In the scheme, each intermediate node informs its congestion status to the source node. Two kinds of control packets are used for this mechanism. One (a choke packet) is to throttle the rate and another (a loosen packet) is to allow increase of the rate. The source node initiates transmission with a low rate and increases the rate slowly to avoid a rapid increase of the packet queueing at an intermediate node. When the source node receives a choke packet, it decreases the rate rapidly to relieve congestion as soon as possible. The source node upon receipt a loosen packet increases the rate slowly again. We develop a queueing model to investigate the parameter settings to provide a good performance via simulation. The increasing and decreasing parameters of the rate control function are first investigated in various load conditions. We next examine the effect of the queue-length threshold value for the indication of congestion at the intermediate node. The numerical results indicate that the threshold value should be small to obtain a good performance. We finally introduce a technique which accurately recognizes congestion and inhibits an acceptable queueing of the packets at intermediate nodes.