anchor.diff:  
   == Conclusion
   
  -It seems that even consumer-grade Ethernet networks actually exhibit very deterministic performance with regards to latency. There were also no lost packets and none were received out-of-order. Large and extremely dangerous industrial robots should still only be controlled using specialized networking equipment, but for most robotic applications standard UDP is going to be more than sufficient.
  -
  -The unexpectedly high latency and jitter that is commonly observed in network benchmarks seem to be caused practically entirely by the underlying operating systems and their device drivers. The two charts below show comparable baseline setups with different senders over time spans of 10 hours and 10 minutes. The configurations were as follows:
  +It seems that even consumer-grade Ethernet networks actually exhibit very deterministic performance with regards to latency. There were also no lost packets and none were received out-of-order. Large and dangerous industrial robots should still only be controlled using specialized networking equipment, but for most robotic applications I feel that standard UDP is more than sufficient.
  +
  +The high latency and jitter that is commonly observed in network benchmarks seem to be caused almost entirely by the underlying operating systems and their device drivers. The two charts below show comparable baseline setups with different senders over time spans of 10 hours and 10 minutes. The configurations were as follows:
   
   * ChibiOS 2.6.8 with lwIP 1.4.1 on 168 MHz STM32F407
   * Windows 10 on Gigabyte Brix-i7-4470R with Realtek NIC
  
positive.code: 
  == Micro-bursting
  
  When I get this far in a conversation, I often get push back claiming that while this may be true for single devices, UDP will surely blow up once more than one thing is connected.
  
  In order to test the actual behavior we put together a test setup consisting of 40 HEBI Robotics I/O boards that are connected to a  http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/GS748Tv1/GS748T_ds_03Feb05.pdf[GS748T] 48-port Ethernet switch. Each board runs the 'receiver' firmware. Sending a single broadcast message to all receiver devices triggers 40x266 byte (>10KB total) return packets that can arrive at the switch within less than 250 nanoseconds. This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-bursting_(networking)[Microburst] traffic pattern is representative of a very high degree of freedom system such as a full body humanoid robot.
  
  [.text-center]
  .Network test setup with 40 HEBI Robotics IO Boards
  
negative.code: [NOTE]
  TODO: Replace with a new picture that doesn't have a heater in the back?
  
  This setup also benefits from two convenient side effects of using a standard networking stack to communicate with robotic hardware:
  
  1. There is no need for any manual addressing because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Host_Configuration_Protocol[DHCP] and device specific globally unique mac addresses.
  
  