Traffic flow (computer networking)

In packet switching networks, traffic flow, packet flow or network flow is a sequence of packets from a source computer to a destination, which may be another host, a multicast group, or a broadcast domain. RFC 2722 defines traffic flow as "an artificial logical equivalent to a call or connection."^[1] RFC 3697 defines traffic flow as "a sequence of packets sent from a particular source to a particular unicast, anycast, or multicast destination that the source desires to label as a flow. A flow could consist of all packets in a specific transport connection or a media stream. However, a flow is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport connection."^[2] Flow is also defined in RFC 3917 as "a set of IP packets passing an observation point in the network during a certain time interval."^[3] Packet flow temporal efficiency can be affected by one-way delay (OWD) that is described as a combination of the following components:

• Processing delay (the time taken to process a packet in a network node)
• Queuing delay (the time a packet waits in a queue until it can be transmitted)
• Transmission delay (the amount of time necessary to push all the packet into the wire)
• Propagation delay (amount of time it takes the signal’s header to travel from the sender to the receiver)