Latency Measurement applications measure the latency of events on a network. Latency measurements can be performed on different network levels with different purposes:
- Packet Level: Latency of packets carrying e.g. VoIP traffic can be measured to monitor the QoS of the VoIP traffic, including variations in the latency (packet jitter).
- Protocol Level: Latency can be measured between a protocol request and response, e.g. between a TCP data packet and a corresponding TCP ACK packet. Latency measurements at this level can be used to optimize low-level network performance.
- Application Level: Latency can be measured for an application, e.g. for a web server (measuring the latency between a HTTP request packet and a HTTP response packet).
- Transaction Level: Latency can be measured for a transaction that might involve exchange of several frames between the involved endpoints. Transaction level latency measurements can be used e.g. for measurements of financial transactions or measurements of database access performance.
