Latency is one important part of a larger issue in networking called quality of service or QoS which measures how long it takes for data to travel across a network.characteristics of how data is transmitted between devices .
Bandwidth Reservation: The ability to reserve a portion of bandwidth in a network or interface for a period of time, so that two devices can count on having that bandwidth for a particular operation. This is used for multimedia applications where data must be streamed in real-time and packet rerouting and retransmission would result in problems. This is also called resource reservation.
Latency Management: Limits the latency in any data transfer between two devices to a value.
Traffic Prioritization: In conventional networks, “all packets are created equal”. A QoS feature is the ability to handle packets so that more important connections receive priority over less important one.
Traffic Shaping: the use of buffers and limits that restrict traffic across a connection to be within a pre-determined maximum.
Network Congestion Avoidance: Monitoring particular connections in a network, and rerouting data when a particular part of the network is becoming congested.
