AuthorsB. Briscoe, A. Brunström, A. Petlund, D. A. Hayes, D. Ros, I. Tsang, S. Gjessing, G. Fairhurst, C. Griwodz and M. Welzl
TitleReducing Internet Latency: A Survey of Techniques and their Merits
AfilliationCommunication Systems, Communication Systems
Project(s)RITE: Reducing Internet Transport Latency
StatusPublished
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2014
JournalIEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials
Volume18
Issue3
Pagination2149–2196
Date Published10/2016
PublisherIEEE Communications Society
ISSN1553-877X
Other NumbersISSN: 1553-877X
KeywordsInternet, latency, network
Abstract

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 article offers a broad survey of techniques aimed at tackling latency in the literature up to August 2014, and 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, especially 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.

URLhttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=6967689
DOI10.1109/COMST.2014.2375213
Citation Key19168

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