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Difficulty: MediumNetwork Performance Monitoring and Metrics

During an enterprise network audit, users report periodic voice distortion and video freezing during teleconference sessions over a WAN connection. Telemetry shows that overall link utilization is below 35% and total packet loss is 0%, but packet inter-arrival times fluctuate significantly between 4 ms and 130 ms. Which network performance metric is directly causing this quality degradation?

  1. JitterAnswer
  2. B
    Duplex mismatch
  3. C
    Implicit deny drops
  4. D
    Port number mismatch

Answer

Jitter is the performance metric directly responsible for inter-arrival time fluctuations in real-time communication streams.
Jitter represents the variation in latency over time. Real-time media protocols rely on predictable packet arrival intervals. When inter-arrival times vary significantly, buffering mechanisms cannot smoothly process the stream, leading to audio artifacts and video frame stalls.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the observed symptoms
Real-time communication applications (VoIP and video) suffer quality degradation despite sufficient available bandwidth and zero packet loss.
Real-time traffic is uniquely sensitive to delay variation rather than raw throughput constraints.
2
Evaluate the telemetry measurements
Fluctuations in inter-arrival times between 4 ms and 130 ms represent delay variance.
Variable packet arrival delay directly matches the definition of network jitter.
3
Identify the target metric
Jitter buffering or quality of service (QoS) queueing must be tuned to stabilize real-time packet delivery.
Addressing jitter resolves voice fragmentation and video playback freezes.

Key Concept

Jitter is the variance in latency (packet arrival delay) over time, critical to real-time protocols like RTP used in VoIP and video conferencing.
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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Topics

Network Performance Monitoring and Metrics

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