Latency
Latency turns up in 2 fields: hydrography, telecom & it. Here is what it means to the people in each one.
Latency in hydrography
A time delay between when a sensor measures something and when that measurement gets its time stamp.
A timing offset between sensors, most often between positioning and sonar. Just 50 milliseconds at 8 knots moves soundings about 20 cm along track, and timing errors between attitude and sonar are worse because the vessel is rotating. Synchronizing every sensor to GNSS time with a pulse-per-second signal removes most latency, and the patch test checks what remains by running one line at two speeds over a slope.
"Latency check shows the slope moving with speed, the PPS cable must have worked loose."
Latency in telecom & it
The time it takes for a packet of data to travel from its source to its destination.
A measure of delay in a network, representing the time required for a data packet to travel from one point to another. In networking, it is usually measured in milliseconds as round-trip time. High latency causes sluggish application performance and ruins real-time communications like voice calls or video conferencing, regardless of how much bandwidth is available.
"We need to route the VoIP traffic over the new fiber link to get the latency under 50 milliseconds."