Nokia's Recipe for Lower Latency

A post by Thomas Kaps [pictured] to Nokia's blog lists "3 ways to reduce latency to milliseconds [for] real-time applications and data communication that demand instant responses from the network to create an enjoyable experience:

• Throughput:... Good news is that throughput increase and latency reduction are now important design criteria, as we progress from one generation of technology evolution to the next. LTE reduces round-trip-time (RTT) by 50% compared to the previous technology generation and 5G will reduce it further to single-digit milliseconds.
  
  In addition, throughput can be improved with known techniques such as Carrier Aggregation or Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP), in addition to deploying LTE, Single RAN and Small Cells. Increasing fiber availability will also provide bandwidth galore.

• Proximity: The only absolute constraints on latency are distance and the speed of light .. The only way to improve this is to reduce the distance between devices and the content and applications they are accessing. Bringing data storage and processing closer to the user can be achieved through approaches such as Mobile Edge Computing [see "Mobile Edge Computing Group Formed" - here] as demonstrated by Nokia’s Liquid Applications solution [see "Rumors: NSN's Liquid Applications Uses Saguna's Technology" - here].
  
  Another promising development is Software Defined Networking (SDN). When applied to mobile network functions such as gateways, SDN can bring applications and network resources closer to the end user or even fast forward traffic to local nodes, bypassing central nodes when relevant.
  
  Introducing flat IP and distributed cloud-based architectures can also help improve latency by reducing the number of hops and elements required for packets to traverse through.

• Control: .. software-driven measures that provide ‘dynamic network control’ can also help improve latency at a session/application level. For example, software applications ensure that heterogeneous resources are applied intelligently on a case-to-case basis in real time depending on the network situation, application needs, and desired QoE.
  
  Functionalities such as Application aware RAN and Network aware applications can improve latency for specific applications. Nokia’s Dynamic Experience Management (DEM) delivers required QoE at a session level, including measured and perceived latency, through a fast loop control of measurement, analytics, decisions and actions all in real-time. DEM combined with network-level orchestration across all domains will pave the way to get from optimized reaction to automated prediction and control of latency dynamically". 

See "Don’t let latency make you dizzy" - here.