Although Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is widely used in the Internet, its performance is poor in networks with long delays. To improve TCP performance in such networks as long-delay satellite environments, the use of a PEP (Performance Enhancing Proxy) has been proposed. The PEP operates on a router that connects a terrestrial link and a satellite link along a TCP connection. When a data packet arrives at the PEP, it forwards the packet to the destination host, transmits the corresponding ACK (premature ACK) to the source host on behalf of the destination host, and stores a copy of the packet in a local buffer (PEP buffer) in case retransmission of the packet is required. As a congestion control method on the PEP, a method that keeps the number of prematurely acknowledged packets in the PEP buffer below a threshold (watermark) value has been proposed. However, an optimization method of the watermark value has not been proposed. In this paper, we propose an adaptive watermark value optimization algorithm that maximizes the average throughput of each connection in response to dynamic establishment and release of connections, under a fairness condition that the average throughputs of connections are equal to each other. Numerical examples using the NS2 simulator for a simple network model show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.