processing runs 60 and the minimum achievable latency through the system 80 if the signal processing runs significantly faster than real time the signal processing application 30 can quickly catch up if it is stalled due to jitter therefore a short output queue of scheduled transmission data is sufficient on the other hand if signal processing is only a little faster than real time a longer output queue is needed to avoid underruns when signal processing is much faster than real time processor utilization is low therefore there is a tradeoff between efficiency and latency as efficiency increases meaning fewer unused processor resources the required latency also increases the slope of the line relating efficiency and latency is determined by the total jitter of the system traditional signal processing algorithm design requires fixed processing cost per input sample or block if the algorithm is faster in some cases than others sufficient time is allocated for the worst case scenario in the system described herein variations in signal processing computation latency can be treated as simply another source of jitter therefore the system can be designed to run more quickly in the common case and if it runs into an uncommon case that requires more computation it will catch up from that delay without missing any deadlines to make this safe the designer performs sufficient statistical analysis on the input data to assure that the uncommon case really is uncommon enough for the system to run reliably without underruns or the designer assures that an occasional.