Simulative evaluation of a decentralized packet synchronization algorithm for short range mobile radio networks

Hoff et al. (Proc. IEEE Vehic. Techn. Conf., 1991) presented the transmit majority synchronization (TMS) algorithm for decentralized mobile radio networks. A first scenario was analyzed, and early simulation results were given. Detailed simulation results of TMS are presented with a comparison to a simple reference protocol called last received synchronization (LRS). A different performance measure, the synchronization time of two unsynchronized groups, is evaluated for different group sizes and vehicle speeds. TMS shows a good performance in any case. Looking at realistic group sizes and group ranges TMS needs fewer than three frames to synchronize the two groups completely. LRS is a trivial algorithm, which does not need any overhead. Nevertheless, the performance is worse than that of TMS. The synchronization time of LRS is 2 to 6 times larger than with TMS