Cisco ENCOR Practice Exam 2025 – All-in-One Comprehensive Guide to Mastering Enterprise Network Core Technologies!

The delay type that accounts for the time taken to send packets across a physical medium is serialization delay. This type of delay occurs when data packets are queued for transmission and the length of time it takes to place the bits of a packet on the wire is determined by the size of the packet and the bandwidth of the link. Essentially, serialization delay is calculated by dividing the packet size (in bits) by the transmission rate (in bits per second) of the link.

For instance, if a packet is 1,500 bytes (or 12,000 bits) and is sent over a link with a speed of 1 Mbps (1,000,000 bits per second), the time taken to send that packet would be 12,000 bits / 1,000,000 bps = 0.012 seconds. This means that serialization delay directly represents the queuing time and the physical act of placing the packet on the transmission medium, thus making it a crucial factor in network latency.

Propagation delay, on the other hand, refers to the time it takes for a signal to travel from the sender to the receiver across the medium, while processing delay is associated with the time routers or switches take to process packets, and delay variation concerns