Understanding Network Latency and Jitter

Time is the key to understanding and delivering acceptable service levels to end users. Two important measurements of time intervals in network transmission systems are referred to as “latency” and “jitter”. Understanding latency and jitter sources and how their values change in network architectures is critical to engineering network/application performance and optimizing information resources.

This paper defines network latency and jitter, identifies the sources that introduce delay into data transmission, and explains how such variables in time impact application performance and end-user experience.