A content-aware congestion control scheme for software MPLS routers enables the MPLS routers to discard packets with less important content when there is congestion in the network. By employing such content-aware congestion control, the overall quality of multimedia content is not significantly affected, enabling graceful degradation of quality using a Wavelet based compression technique. The MPLS router marks wavelet-based compressed multimedia packets as those containing important or less important contents of compressed and encoded frames. Such markings enable the MPLS router to make decisions according to the packet's priority. At times of congestion, this router restricts the rate of outgoing low priority traffic to allow high priority streams to maintain a gracefully degraded QoS for compressed multimedia content.