Latency is measured as what?

• A. Amount of data transferred per unit time.
• B. Time for a single packet to traverse the network.
• C. Variation in delay between packets.
• D. Percentage of packets not delivered.

Answer: (B)

Latency measures the time it takes for a single packet to traverse the network from source to destination. This end-to-end delay includes propagation, transmission, processing, and queuing delays as the packet moves along its path. It’s typically expressed in milliseconds and represents how long a packet spends in the network, not how much data can be moved (that’s throughput), nor the variability of delays (jitter), nor the fraction of packets that never arrive (loss). If you measure round-trip time with a tool like ping, you’re seeing roughly twice the one-way latency on networks with symmetric paths, since the signal must travel there and back.