As the interest of flexible manufacturing systems and computer integrated manufacturing systems increase, the distribution of centralized control systems using industrial control networks is getting more attention. In this paper, we investigate the rate-based traffic control of industrial control networks to improve the performance regarding the throughput, fairness, and error rates. Especially, we consider the protocol of Lon-$Works^{(TM)}$ which consists of all OSI 7-layers and supports various communication media at a low cost. Basically, the proposed rate-based traffic control system is closed loop by utilizing the feedback channel errors, which shows improved performance when compared with other industrial control networks commonly operated in open loop. To this end, an additional network node called monitoring node is introduced to check the channel status without increasing the channel load. The Proposed control loop is in effect whenever the feedback channel error becomes greater than an admittable value. We demonstrate the improved performance of the controlled network system in view of throughput and fairness measures by implementing the lab-scale network system based on LonWorks and through the experimentation upon it.