2014/11/26 by Bob Briscoe, Anna Brunström, Andreas Petlund +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Network Traffic and Congestion Control #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #Caching and Content Delivery #Computer science #Latency (audio) #Bottleneck #Computer network #The Internet #Server #Queueing theory #Propagation delay #Retard #Distributed computing #Telecommunications #Embedded system #Operating system
paper · doi:10.1109/comst.2014.2375213
openalex publication_date 2014/11/26 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Latency is increasingly becoming a performance bottleneck for Internet Protocol (IP) networks, but historically, networks have been designed with aims of maximizing throughput and utilization. This paper offers a broad survey of techniques aimed at tackling latency in the literature up to August 2014, as well as their merits. A goal of this work is to be able to quantify and compare the merits of the different Internet latency reducing techniques, contrasting their gains in delay reduction versus the pain required to implement and deploy them. We found that classifying techniques according to the sources of delay they alleviate provided the best insight into the following issues: 1) The structural arrangement of a network, such as placement of servers and suboptimal routes, can contribute significantly to latency; 2) each interaction between communicating endpoints adds a Round Trip Time (RTT) to latency, particularly significant for short flows; 3) in addition to base propagation delay, several sources of delay accumulate along transmission paths, today intermittently dominated by queuing delays; 4) it takes time to sense and use available capacity, with overuse inflicting latency on other flows sharing the capacity; and 5) within end systems, delay sources include operating system buffering, head-of-line blocking, and hardware interaction. No single source of delay dominates in all cases, and many of these sources are spasmodic and highly variable. Solutions addressing these sources often both reduce the overall latency and make it more predictable.