In various embodiments, methods and systems are disclosed for a hybrid rate plus window based congestion protocol that controls the rate of packet transmission into the network and provides low queuing delay, practically zero packet loss, fair allocation of network resources amongst multiple flows, and full link utilization. In one embodiment, a congestion window may be used to control the maximum number of outstanding bits, a transmission rate may be used to control the rate of packets entering the network (packet pacing), a queuing delay based rate update may be used to control queuing delay within tolerated bounds and minimize packet loss, and aggressive ramp-up/graceful back-off may be used to fully utilize the link capacity and additive-increase, multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) rate control may be used to provide fairness amongst multiple flows.