Network performance refers to measures of service quality of a network as seen by the customer. There are many different ways to measure the performance of a network, as each network is different in nature and design. Performance can also be modeled and simulated instead of measured; one example of this is using state transition diagrams to model queuing performance or to use a Network Simulator. Performance measures The following measures are often considered important: Bandwidth commonly measured in bits/second is the maximum rate that information can be transferred Throughput is the actual rate that information is transferred Latency the delay between the sender and the receiver decoding it, this is mainly a function of the signals travel time, and processing time at any nodes the information traverses Jitter variation in packet delay at the receiver of the information Error rate the number of corrupted bits expressed as a percentage or fraction of the total sent Bandwidth The available channel bandwidth and achievable signal-to-noise ratio determine the maximum possible throughput. It is not generally possible to send more data than dictated by the Shannon-Hartley Theorem. Throughput Throughput is the number of messages successfully delivered per unit time. Throughput is controlled by available bandwidth, as well as the available signal-to-noise ratio and hardware limitations. Throughput for the purpose of this article will be understood to be measured from the arrival of the first bit of data at the receiver, to decouple the concept of throughput from the concept of latency. For discussions of this type, the terms 'throughput' and 'bandwidth' are often used interchangeably. The Time Window is the period over which the throughput is measured. The choice of an appropriate time window will often dominate calculations of throughput, and whether latency is taken into account or not will determine whether the latency affects the throughput or not. Latency The speed of light imposes a minimum propagation time on all electromagnetic signals. It is not possible to reduce the latency below where s is the distance and cm is the speed of light in the medium (roughly 200,000 km/s for most fiber or electrical media, depending on their velocity factor). This approximately means an additional millisecond round-trip delay (RTT) per 100 km (or 62 miles) of distance between hosts. Other delays also occur in intermediate nodes. In packet switched networks delays can occur due to queueing. Jitter Jitter is the undesired