Performance analysis of flooding time synchronization protocol in traffic monitoring scenarios

Many road applications as real-time traffic monitoring, vehicle counting and speed measurements, environmental and pollution monitoring along the roads, impose accurate time reference of detected events. In the most of the applications, measurement stations are based on distributed architectures in which one node acts as master and the others, defined slaves, have to be synchronized with the master. Generally, the master is equipped with a clock reference based on the Global Positioning System, while the slaves are synchronized with the master by the way of suitable synchronization protocols. Focusing the attention on such protocols, in a previousstage the authors analyzedthe effect, on the synchronization performance, of the finite resolution of the timing clock, the presence of clock drift, clock jitter and wander, the presence of real latencies of the radio devices and microcontroller. This paper extends the study by considering further factors of influence as the distance among nodes, the level of the transmission power, the receiver sensitivity and the effect of the environmental factors.