Jitter (packet delay variation)
Variation in delay from one packet to the next; in industrial control, how far the arrival of cyclic data wanders from its nominal interval.
The network analogy
The same packet delay variation you track for voice, measured against a control cycle instead of a playout buffer.
Why it matters for wireless
On Wi-Fi, contention, retries, and roams make delay vary from packet to packet, and the tail of that distribution, not the average, decides whether a cyclic connection times out.
RFC 3393 avoids the word and defines IP packet delay variation as the difference in one-way delay between selected packets, noting that different communities use jitter in contradictory ways. The DetNet architecture lists bounded jitter (packet delay variation) among its service targets.
For scale, PROFINET’s isochronous class supports applications with jitter of less than 1 µs1 on wired, synchronized networks. On a radio, contention backoff and access point transitions put the variation in the milliseconds and above, which is why you budget for the tail.
About this page
Built from 4 sources: 2 standards bodies and labs and 2 protocol owners and alliances. Researched and drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and approved by Ben Rutter on . How pages are made
- First published
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Cite this page
Plain
Ben Rutter. "Jitter (packet delay variation)." OT Wireless, published October 5, 2026. https://otwireless.com/glossary/jitter/
APA 7
Rutter, B. (2026, October 5). Jitter (packet delay variation). OT Wireless. https://otwireless.com/glossary/jitter/
BibTeX
@misc{rutter2026jitter,
author = {Rutter, Ben},
title = {{Jitter (packet delay variation)}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://otwireless.com/glossary/jitter/}},
organization = {OT Wireless},
}