TCP is the most widely used congestion protocol in
the Internet. However, TCP has some limitations, even in the
wired world, such as not providing high utilizations in high
bandwidth-delay product networks, and introducing high load
and overhead in the network. Due to these limitations, several
congestion protocols have been proposed. Some of the most
known and recent protocols developed to provide faster and
lighter congestion control are eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP)
and Rate Control Protocol (RCP). These protocols have been
proposed essentially to work in wired networks and environments;
however, there are already new versions of XCP for
wireless networks. Since these protocols have a large acceptation
on the research field, and simultaneously,Wireless mesh networks
(WMN) are in undergoing rapid progress, it is important to
evaluate how XCP and RCP behave in these networks, as compared
to TCP. This paper presents an evaluation study of TCP,
XCP and RCP in WMNs, studying different WMN scenarios.
Surprisingly, the results show that TCP is more efficient in mesh
scenarios, being more fair and stable than XCP and RCP. To
obtain the available network capacity, both XCP and RCP need
that all nodes in the network cooperate, which increases network
overhead, and reduces performance and fairness. Moreover, their
capacity evaluation is not accurate in wireless networks.