Course lecture: Sources of delay on the Internet

Related readings

The discussion on sources of delay in the course lecture is based on a comprehensive survey on latency and its mitigations. Depending on your interests, read it on a higher level to get an overview of the different sources of delay and their possible mitigations or dig into the details of the mechanisms and the extensive list of references provided in the survey.

• B. Briscoe et al., Reducing Internet Latency: A Survey of Techniques and their Merits, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, Volume: 18, Issue: 3, 2016. (Mandatory for credit bearing course)

One important source of delay is queueing delay that may occur in the buffers along a network path. The excessive delay that may occur in large buffers is often referred to as bufferbloat. A good introduction to bufferbloat is provided by two of the initial members of the bufferbloat community that has worked hard to reduce latency:

• J. Gettys and K. Nichols, Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet, ACM Queue, nov. 2011, vol . 9, no. 11. (Mandatory for credit bearing course)