Latency Based Forwarding (LBF) techniques are presented for the management of the latencies, or delays, of packets forwarded over nodes, such as routers, of a network. In addition to a network header indicating a destination node for receiving the packet, a packet also includes an LBF header indicating the packets accumulated delay since leaving the sender, a maximum latency for the entire journey from the sender to the receiver and a minimum latency for the entire journey from the sender to the receiver. When a packet is received at a node, based on the accumulated delay, the maximum latency, and the minimum latency, the node places the packet in a forwarding queue to manage the delays between the sender and the receiver. The LBF can also indicate a policy for the forwarding node to used when determining the enqueueing of the packet.