In this paper we introduce a new design method of the sliding mode controller for connection oriented communication networks. To determine the controller we transform the state matrix describing the network dynamics into the Frobenius form and select the sliding variable with relative degree less than or equal to the order of the system. Data losses and transmission delays are taken into consideration. The design method proposed in this paper results in finite time queue length convergence to its demand value. This desirable property is obtained without the need of explicit selection of the closed-loop system state matrix eigenvalues. Then, a time-varying sliding hyperplane is introduced in order to constrain the data flow rate at the beginning of the control process.