Abstract-The localization of Internet hosts opens space for a wide scope of applications, from targeted, location aware content provision to localizing illegal content. In this paper we present a novel probabilistic approach, called Spotter, for estimating the geographic position of Internet devices with remarkable precision. While the existing methods use landmark specific calibration for building their internal models we show that the delay-distance data follow a generic distribution for each landmark. Hence, instead of describing the delay-distance space in a landmark specific manner our proposed method handles all the calibration points together and derives a common delay-distance model. This fundamental discovery indicates that, in contrast to prior techniques, Spotter is less prone to measurement errors and other anomalies such as indirect routing. To demonstrate the robustness and the accuracy of Spotter we test the performance on PlanetLab nodes as well as on a more realistic reference set collected by CAIDA explicitly for geolocation comparison purposes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use this novel ground truth containing over 23000 network routers with their geographic locations.

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Online sharing of scientific information has accelerated the research activity in various different domains of science. This fact inspires us to initiate this kind of approach in the field of network research and review some projects pointing towards this direction. Using the experiences of similar efforts in other domains of sciences we are building a prototype node for Network Measurement Virtual Observatory. The goal of the observatory is to stimulate network research through sharing available measurement data along with analysis results and providing easy-to-use "online" network data analysis tools for network research and management purposes. We would also like to initiate discussion about standardization of network measurement data and to motivate other researchers to publish their own data and tools. In this paper we sketch the basic concept of Virtual Observatories and present a prototype system developed to share measurement data and tools associated with the ETOMIC measurement infrastructure.

This study outlines two novel techniques which can be used in the area of IP geolocation. First we introduce a detailed path-latency model to be able to determine the overall propagation delays along the network paths more accurately. This knowledge then leads to more precise geographic distance estimation between network routers and measurement nodes. In addition to the application of the detailed path-latency model, we describe a method which utilizes high-precision one-way delay measurements to further increase the accuracy of router geolocation techniques. The precise one-way delay values are used as a "path-constraint" to limit the overall geographic distance between the measurement nodes. The approach introduced in this paper can be used to localize all the network routers along the network path between the measurement nodes and can be combined with other existing geolocation techniques. The introduced techniques are validated in a wide range of experiments performed in the ETOMIC measurement infrastructure.