In this paper, we propose a novel real-time frame-layer rate control algorithm using sliding window method for low bit rate video coding. The proposed rate control method performs bit allocation at the frame level to minimize the average distortion over an entire sequence as well as variations in distortion between frames. A new frame-layer rate-distortion model is derived, and a non-iterative optimization method is used for low computational complexity. In order to reduce the quality fluctuation, we use a sliding window scheme which does not require the pre-analysis process. Therefore, the proposed algorithm does not produce time delay from encoding, and is suitable for real-time low-complexity video encoder. Experimental results indicate that the proposed control method provides better visual and PSNR performance than the existing TMN8 rate control method.