Quality of Service

2. Latency. Latency, also known as delay, is a measure of the time it takes to traverse the network, including going through any intermediate routers. It represents the elapsed time between a sending node sending a packet and receiving node receiving that packet. For example, on my system, a local loopback (sending a packet back to the same machine) gives me a latency of 0.043 ms (milliseconds). The time to send a packet to a remote system on my LAN incurs a latency of 0.18 ms, sending a packet to Rutgers (about 30 km or 19 miles straight line distance) takes 11.6 ms, and sending a packet to IIT in Bangalore, India (about 13400 km or 8300 miles) takes 140 ms.