Network latency has a substantial effect on the performance of any request-driven file transfer protocol, since it causes a delay between the time the client issues a request for a file and the time when the data for that file starts to arrive. This is one of the principal disadvantages of purely on-demand transfer strategies, such as downloading individual files. The request latency problem is compounded when the available bandwidth is high, since the penalty associated with each request is the product of the latency and the bandwidth (since the product is the amount of data that can be transferred during one latency period).
To decrease the penalty associated with network latency, it is necessary to reduce the number of requests issued by the client. The simplest way to do this in bundling is to find ways to increase the bundle size. In our experiments, we tested a range of bundling parameters, with the goal of producing bundlings with a large average bundle size. Section 3 will show how well we were able to counteract the effects of network latency.