The rapid development of information technology has promoted the transformation of traditional networks into intelligent networks. Huge data traffic is generated by various types of traffic services in the intelligent networks, which can easily lead to network congestion, system instability, and other problems. These problems may incur great requirements and pose challenges for queue management algorithms. Most traditional active queue management (AQM) algorithms judge the congestion level of the network based only on the size of the average queue length while ignoring the network traffic variations. This makes these algorithms difficult to achieve effective improvement of congestion control efficiency. To address this problem, a novel network congestion control algorithm, namely the average queue length and change rate -RED (AC-RED) is proposed in this paper. AC-RED can better relieve network congestion by reconfiguring the packet loss strategy model based on the average queue length change rate. The simulation results of NS2 show that in complex and dynamic network environments, the performance of AC-RED algorithm in the average queue length, packet loss rate, delay, and delay jitter is improved in most load conditions compared with the other five algorithms.INDEX TERMS Active queue management; network congestion; average queue length change rate; AC-RED; NS2