round trip time (RTT)

Round Trip Time (RTT) or Round Trip Delay(RTD) is the response time of a complete network, better known as ping time.

The round trip time is the amount of time required to send a signal from a source over the network to the receiver, and in turn to transport the receiver's response back over the network to the sender. Round trip time, or packet round trip time, is considered in some routing algorithms to determine the optimal route.

On the Internet, the round trip time depends on various influences. For example, the traffic volume, the selected route or transmission bottlenecks, which mainly occur in cross-regional areas. These influences increase the packet loss rate and the latency time and thus the round trip time. On the Internet, this can be between a few milliseconds and 500 milliseconds.