-2o1o- Does MTU affect your network latency?

As most of you might have already aware about, there are a few common factors that bear potential to affect the overall network performance, such as the size of bandwidth, the distance between two sending and receiving nodes, the quality of the transmission medium, the strength of the wireless signal etc. Now I'm going to discuss about something other than the common factors that affects the overall network performance, the MTU.

For simplicity's sake, I shall not confuse you passages of purple prose regarding MTU. The short yet understandable definition of MTU: MTU(Max Transmission Unit) is the maximum size of packet being sent across network without being fragmented. The pertinent question being posed is that, "How does MTU affects the latency of a network?".

I do aware that the you as the one reading this might be a computer geek that does lots of network related stuff daily and you might think that since MTU is only a measure of the maximum size of a packet before it gets fragmented, the increment/decrement of its size would only affect the number of packets being fragmented across network and it would not affect the total capacity of a network, let alone the transmission speed. However, the nature of the network is that, every packet fragments will have a network frame attached to it. What a frame does that it carries the information like source/destination address, frame sequence, checksum, TTL, so that the intended recipient knows that the packet belongs to it upon reception by looking at the destination address. The recipient then assembles the fragmented packets in accordance with the frame sequence. 

Consequently, it's necessary for every fragmented packets to have a frame attached so that it can be received by the intended recipient and be assembled into its initial form. In conclusion, the smaller the MTU size is, the more fragments a packet need to break into, the more frames need to be sent and ultimately it leads to heavier network overhead.