The following measures are often considered important: The available channel bandwidth and achievable signal-to-noise ratio determine the maximum possible throughput.
It is not possible to reduce the latency below where s is the distance and cm is the speed of light in the medium (roughly 200,000 km/s for most fiber or electrical media, depending on their velocity factor).
This approximately means an additional millisecond round-trip delay (RTT) per 100 km (or 62 miles) of distance between hosts.
Jitter is a significant, and usually undesired, factor in the design of almost all communications links (e.g., USB, PCI-e, SATA, OC-48).
The relationship between throughput, latency, and user experience is most aptly understood in the context of a shared network medium, and as a scheduling problem.
In the Media Access Control (MAC) layer, performance issues such as throughput and end-to-end delay are also addressed.
These long path length considerations are exacerbated when communicating with space probes and other long-range targets beyond Earth's atmosphere.
[3] Several different methods have been proposed to handle the intermittent connectivity and long delays between packets, such as delay-tolerant networking.
Transportation is concerned almost entirely with throughput, which is why physical deliveries of backup tape archives are still largely done by vehicle.