Adaptive gain reduction for background connections

The technologies disclosed herein provide improvements to the Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT) protocol. Some aspects of the present disclosure introduce an adaptive congestion window gain for background connections. In some configurations, a gain value for influencing the transmission rate of a background connection is dynamically adjusted based on data indicating a round trip time (RTT). The RTT includes a sum of a time in which the data is communicated to a remote device and a time in which acknowledgement is data returned from the remote device. In some configurations, the gain is decreased when the RTT is below a threshold and the gain is increased when the RTT is above the threshold. Among other features, the present disclosure also provides techniques involving a modified slow-start, multiplicative decrease and periodic slowdowns. The features disclosed herein mitigate some existing issues, such as latency drift, inter-LEDBAT fairness, and unnecessary slowdowns.