When the network is involved in the system, it will almost certainly prove to be the system's greatest enemy. There are two parts to the problem -- network latency, the delay between sending and receiving data which increases as the amount of traffic on the network increases, and throughput speed, the (total) rate at which data can be sent across the network.
A large network latency will impose an overall latency in a Stereocam system running across a network, as occurs in video-conferencing systems. The latency here is somewhat more sinister, though, as (usually) two frames must be received from different computers, each of which may have different latencies. Large, differing or varying latencies will lower the usefulness of any heartbeat packets in the system and may allow frames to fall out of synchronisation if some kind of tagging technique is not in use to correlate images (as in Section 2.3.1).
Limited network throughput speeds serve to introduce a pseudo-latency when transmitting larger amounts of data (due to the finite size of the data and network speed). This restriction on the size of transmitted data can impose a subsequent restriction on the size of the image being displayed across a network, in terms of its dimensions (including colour depth)6. Alternatively, some form of compression may be employed to allow the images to require less data to be transmitted.