Transmission Delay

Transmission delay is the time required to push all the bits of a packet into the communication link, determined by the link's bandwidth. Unlike propagation delay, which depends on distance, transmission delay depends on the packet size and the data rate of the network interface.

If a packet is large or the bandwidth is limited, transmission delay becomes a bottleneck in data dissemination. In high-frequency trading, minimizing transmission delay is achieved by using high-bandwidth connections and efficient data encoding protocols.

This ensures that market data updates are transmitted as quickly as possible once they are generated. Balancing packet size and transmission speed is a key aspect of network engineering for financial systems.