Highly deterministic latency in a distributed system

Abstract

A distributed computing system, such as may be used to implement an electronic trading system, supports a notion of fairness in latency. The system does not favor any particular client. Thus, being connected to a particular access point into the system (such as via a gateway) does not give any particular device an unfair advantage or disadvantage over another. That end is accomplished by precisely controlling latency, that is, the time between when request messages arrive at the system and a time at which corresponding response messages are permitted to leave. The precisely controlled, deterministic latency can be fixed over time, or it can vary according to some predetermined pattern, or vary randomly within a pre-determined range of values.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.