L4S is pioneered by Nokia’s research arm Nokia Bell Labs and stands for “Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable” throughput.
It is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard technology that tackles a significant source of peak latency on the Internet: queuing delays.
Nokia Bell Labs and Vodafone’s Fixed Access Center of Excellence recently performed the world’s first demonstration of L4S running over PON in Vodafone’s lab in Newbury, UK.
The demonstration was performed on an end-to-end fixed access network built with Nokia technology.
It consisted of a broadband network gateway (BNG), a PON optical line terminal (OLT), multiple PON optical network terminals (ONTs) and Widi access points.
The tests showed low and consistent end-to-end latencies when travelling across every element of the network.
Azimeh Sefidcon, head of network systems and security research for Bell Labs at Nokia said: “These highly encouraging results show L4S will unshackle any real-time application that would normally be constrained by high latency.
“Videoconferencing, cloud-gaming, augmented reality and even the remote operations of drones would run flawlessly across the internet, without experiencing any significant queuing delays.”
L4S network technology consistently achieves near-zero packet queuing delay, no matter how much load the network experiences. By eliminating queuing delays, L4S removes big variations in latency without compromising network speeds.
In the lab tests, Vodafone and Nokia Bell Labs measured consistent latencies of 1.05ms at local ethernet ports running over a fully congested access network (BNG to ONT), and just 12.1ms when including a fully congested Wifi link as the final connection.
L4S can be implemented over any access technology, wireless or wireline and applied to any latency-dependent application.
