A Survey of Latency Reducing Techniques and their Merits

Our working assumptions are that i) the performance of data communications is increasingly held back by limits other than bandwidth and ii) removing these limits will often involve simple inexpensive changes to protocols and code. If true, removing these limits would be a more effective use of time and resources than expensive link hardware upgrades. Indeed, upgrading link speeds would waste investment if it made little difference to performance because the limits were elsewhere. This position paper gives a status report on work we have recently started to survey techniques for reducing the delays in communications. The immediate aim is to organise all the techniques into a meaningful categorisation scheme, then to quantify the benefit of each approach and produce visualisations that highlight those approaches that are likely to be most fruitful.