As transmission speeds increase faster than processing speeds, the packet processing time (PPT) of a host 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 (RFCs 2679 and 2681). To measure the PPT of a host, stamping the times when these two events occur is needed. However, time stamping at the data-link layer may require placing a specialized packet-capture card and the host under test in the same local network. This makes it complex to measure the PPT of remote end hosts. In this paper, we propose a scheme to measure the PPT of an end host connected over a single-or multiple-hop path and without requiring time stamping at the data-link layer. The proposed scheme is based on measuring the capacity of the link connected to the host under test. The scheme was tested on an experimental testbed and in the Internet, over a U.S. inter-state path and an international path between Taiwan and the U.S. We show that the proposed scheme consistently measures PPT of a host.

Accurate measurement of network parameters such as available bandwidth, link capacity, delay, packet loss and jitter are used to support and monitor several network functions, e.g., traffic engineering, Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing, end-to-end transport performance optimization, and link capacity planning. However, proactive network measurement schemes can impact both the data traffic and the measurement process itself, affecting the accuracy of the estimation if a significant amount of probe traffic is injected into the network. In this work, we propose two measurement schemes, one for measuring available bandwidth and the other for measuring link capacity, both of them use a combination of data probe packets and Internet Control Messaging Protocol (ICMP) packets. Our schemes perform available-bandwidth and link-capacity measurements in a short time and with a small amount of probe traffic. We show a performance study of our measurement schemes and compare their accuracy to those of other existing measurement schemes. We show that the proposed schemes achieve shorter convergence time than other existing schemes and high accuracy.

Privacy laws in South Asian countries are still at a nascent stage. Therefore, South Asian websites are susceptible to user privacy violation. This paper presents an assessment of website privacy policies from 10 sectors in the three largest South Asian economies, namely, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Using a manual qualitative analysis on a dataset of 284 popular websites, we assessed the policies based on accessibility, readability, and compliance with 11 privacy principles. Our findings show that overall, the privacy statement accessibility, and privacy compliance of websites from the three countries is low especially in the education, healthcare, and government sectors. Readability is quite low for websites in all 10 sectors of the three countries. Privacy compliance in each country is the highest for the principles of data processing and third-party transfer, whereas it is the lowest for protection of children's data, data retention and portability. Indian websites performed comparatively better amongst the three countries on all three metrics, followed by Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Based on our results, we provide recommendations involving all stakeholders (i.e., website owners, privacy regulators, and users) to help improve privacy protection of user data in South Asia.

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