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| 8.1 |  | Quality of Service Requirements |
| 8.1.4 |  | Delay variation or jitter |

Delay variation or jitter is the difference in the delay times of consecutive packets. A jitter buffer is often used to smooth out arrival times, but there are instantaneous and total limits on buffering ability. Any type of buffering used to reduce jitter directly increases total network delay. In general, traffic requiring low latency also requires a minimum variation in latency.

As a design rule, voice networks cannot cope with more than 30 ms of jitter. Jitter in excess of 30 ms will result in degraded audio performance. Excessive jitter in a streaming video environment will result in jerky motion, loss of video quality or loss of video.