latency

<communications>

1. The time it takes for a packet to cross a network connection, from sender to receiver.

2. The period of time that a frame is held by a network device before it is forwarded.

Two of the most important parameters of a communications channel are its latency, which should be low, and its bandwidth, which should be high. Latency is particularly important for a synchronous protocol where each packet must be acknowledged before the next can be transmitted.

Last updated: 2000-02-27

Nearby terms:

last-in first-out ♦ LAT ♦ latch ♦ latency ♦ LaTeX ♦ Latin 1 ♦ lattice ♦ LAU

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