Measurement of packet processing time of an Internet host using asynchronous packet capture at the data-link layer

As transmission speeds increase faster than processing speeds, the packet processing time (PPT) of a host (i.e., workstation) is becoming more significant in the measurement of different network parameters, in which packet processing by the host is involved. The PPT of a host is the time elapsed between the arrival of a packet at the data-link layer and the time the packet is processed at the application layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack (RFCs 2679 and 2681). In this paper, we propose a methodology to measure the PPT of a host using Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packet and a specialized packet-capture card that does not require synchronization between the host under test and the packet-capture card. We tested the proposed methodology on two hosts with different specifications. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology consistently measures PPT.