H.264/SVC provides scalable video streams which consist of a base layer and one or more enhancement layers. Thus, it can efficiently adapt encoded streams to individual network conditions by dropping some layers of bit streams. However, on a dynamic environment such as the Internet, random packet losses due to network congestion can cause drastic effect on SVC quality. To avoid network congestion, the rate of video streams should be adjusted by carefully selecting a layer of each stream. In this paper, we propose three layer selection algorithms which can avoid network congestion by using the rate-distortion characteristics of streams. Simulation results show that FS(Far-Sighted) algorithm can maximize the overall PSNR value of streams by efficiently using the characteristics of video streams.