HFT guy here.<p>There's problems with using the internet if you want low latency. Not just low latency, but also low jitter, ie consistent latency. You're sharing a bunch of infrastructure with other people, so sometimes your packet will have to wait. Try to ping some internet server a few times and you'll see it changes. I've done this with rented lines, and the number is the same every time.<p>Not inherent to the internet is the fact that REST seems to be a standard. Probably people will want a REST interface. So that means serializing and deserializing messages, and the messages are always going to be a lot longer than they need to be. It's not that you have to do it this way, though. There's also the fact that internet architectures tend to have a bunch of hops (load balancer / gateway / etc), which isn't going to help, but definitely something you could work around.<p>The figures he gives are interesting. If you really need under 20ms for AR to work, how is remote surgery going to work? 20ms is close to the time you get to render a frame in real time games at 60fps, seems a bit fast to me. The surgeon can't be far away if this is true.
I do low latency network architectue for HFTs; I'm not sure there's a real world application for shaving 50us off a latency for a route outside of this industry. That said I've been impressed with Cloudflares consistent global low latency while traveling. It's a habit to ping 1.1.1.1 and see if it goes above 15ms.
It's terrifying to hear him mention self-driving cars as a use case for super low latencies. If a few milliseconds of network latency compromises some safety system in a car, that's bad. I'd be engineering a car for worst case scenarios, not for reliance on a fast network.
It makes me think of this. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...</a>
Then there are mixed reality applications. It won’t need HFT levels of low latency, but will demand a lot more bandwidth. Many of the tricks won’t work there.<p>That’ll require exploiting edge distribution to its limits, with an entire new level of internet infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet.
Network Next is a company working on this, not just for critical applications but also games:<p><a href="https://networknext.com/concept/" rel="nofollow">https://networknext.com/concept/</a>
If you are looking for information on low-latency computing, including some real advice how to tune for lower latency, look for info on HFT.<p>5ms reaction time mentioned on these slides are far cry for what computers can do. trading servers reaction time packet-in packet-out even without fpga can take as little as 20 microseconds.
For VR and AR you really don't need these low latencies over the internet. As long as the visual output matches the users head movement the game assets can have noticable lag. Like most existing games, rubberbanding is an annoyance but not disorienting.<p>For those use cases it would be better to come up with a full 3d (not just stereoscopic) streaming video format that allows for some local camera movement.
Could RAMCloud be a candidate for this … at least to tackle the datacenter level, and —isn't the rest more or less out of control?<p><a href="https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/docs/doxygen/md_README.html" rel="nofollow">https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/docs/doxygen/md_README.html</a>
A whole talk about low latency networking and not a single mention about TSN (time sensitive networking)/AVB (audio video bridging) which <i>actually</i> does low-latency?