Is latency equivalent to RTT?

Wed May 14 15:17:55 UTC 2003

On Wed, 14 May 2003 Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:

>
> Has it become common usage to define latency in an IP network as the round
> trip time in that network?
>
> I've always considered latency to be a one-way measure of delay and RTT to
> be the sum of the latencies in both directions. When I tried to find
> something to back up this view, I discovered that a number of companies
> define latency as equivalent to RTT in their SLAs.
>
> Assuming that one has measuring devices in every PoP, do you think it is
> harder to measure a full matrix of one way latency compared to measuring a
> full matrix of RTT?

The problem is buying and installing the equipment, even if you buy an off
the shelf product like RIPE NCC's TTM :-).  Once installed, these products
will just provide you with the numbers.

> Does it even make sense to measure a full matrix of RTT when the
> measurement of A to B to A should be equivalent to the measurement of B
> to A to B?

If you are sure that the path taken for A-B-A is equal to B-A-B, then no,
measuring only A-B-A is sufficient.

Henk

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That problem that we weren't having yesterday, is it better? (Big ISP NOC)