A detailed study about ultra-short pulse light propagation inside cylindrical scattering and absorbing phantoms is presented. Some comparisons between a Monte Carlo code and the analytical solution of diffusion equation for a delta(t) source and point-like detectors placed at different angles of detection are shown. To better quantify the agreement between the temporal profiles obtained from the two different methods of calculation, a fitting procedure based on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm has been implemented. Some examples on the retrieval of the optical properties for both the Monte Carlo and experimental data are presented. In the case of inhomogeneous cylindrical phantoms, some comparisons between the results of the time-domain 3D model of finite element method and 3D Monte Carlo are also shown.