Latency & Jitter

Overview

Latency and jitter are two key measurement parameters when evaluating and benchmarking the performance of a network, system or device. Different applications have different requirements on traffic latency and jitter. For example, voice over IP (VoIP) services are sensitive to latency and jitter, while data transfer is more tolerant to delay and jitter. As key metrics of Quality of Service (QoS) validation, latency and jitter are often considered the basic benchmarking indicators by network administrators, operators, and engineers. However, for benchmarking different network devices, the definition of latency and jitter can vary according to the RFC standard.

This White Paper clarifies the terms used in time measurement, e.g. latency, jitter, inter-frame gap, latency resolution, speed mismatch, latency over time, and distribution. It also presents how Xena interprets and implements time measurements and how to test latency.

(Users can also find detailed guidelines and examples of time measurement using Xena test equipment in the application note “Measuring Frame Delay Variation”.)

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