ntp possible on ad hoc network in ubuntu ? 12.04 onwards

Question

I am doing a research project on Vehicular Ad hoc networks.. I am using C programming language for socket programming, with four laptops installed with Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 versions. All the laptops are connected to an ad hoc network which I created. And each of these laptops is constantly broadcasting on a broadcast IP address of the ad hoc network. and at the same time, receiving broadcasts from the other three laptops(beaconing or hello packets). I am going to be doing field tests using these 4 laptops in 4 cars each. and I need to do a performance evaluation based on end-to-end delay of the UDP packets under different traffic scenarios.

Now, the problem in finding delay is that all of my four laptops are having different system times. So, I need to synchronize their times, by making one of my 4 laptops as the TIME SERVER..

I have thought of using NTP time sync method. But I realized that NTP works in a client-server fashion, whereas I am using an ad hoc network configuration.. Can anyone tell me whether I can use ntp on ad hoc network? and ,,if that's possible,,,how to configure on each device?

Secondly,, I will not be having Internet connection on any of these 4 laptops while doing the field tests on the road..

Thank You

Answer 1

Given that you're on board a car, why not just tap into the car's GPS for time?

I know that that will not help you in the lab, but you could buy GPS units for the laptops and make each of them Stratum 1 tickers (clocks). This would be consistent with the time variances when in the cars as well.