Towards IP geolocation using delay and topology measurements

Abstract

We present Topology-based Geolocation (TBG), a novel approach to estimating the geographic location of arbitrary Internet hosts. We motivate our work by showing that 1) existing approaches, based on end-to-end delay measurements from a set of landmarks, fail to outperform much simpler techniques, and 2) the error of these approaches is strongly determined by the distance to the nearest landmark, even when triangulation is used to combine estimates from different landmarks. Our approach improves on these earlier techniques by leveraging network topology, along with measurements of network delay, to constrain host position. We convert topology and delay data into a set of constraints, then solve for router and host locations simultaneously. This approach improves the consistency of location estimates, reducing the error substantially for structured networks in our experiments on Abilene and Sprint. For networks with insufficient structural constraints, our techniques integrate external hints that are validated using measurements before being trusted. Together, these techniques lower the median estimation error for our university-based dataset to 67 km vs. 228 km for the best previous approach.

Characterizing the file hosting ecosystem: A view from the edge

“…The location of the IP is mapped closest to the landmark with the lowest RTT. This method has been shown to be comparable with other complicated constraint and topology-based geolocation techniques [17] Figure 6: RTT measurements for host IPs using the shortest ping method…”

Clockscalpel: Understanding Root Causes of Internet Clock Synchronization Inaccuracy

“…We implement this by using a commercial IP geolocation service [17]. To reduce inaccuracy, we also inspect DNS names of ISP routers as a hint to infer their geographic location, as done in [18]. We observe that the round-trip propagation delay (measured by the geolocation-based service) and actual RTT are correlated with a coefficient of 0.56 (with a p-value < 10 −7 ) over PlanetLab nodes.…”

“…They are not perfectly matched because the geolocation service may be inaccurate in some cases. The accuracy is likely to be improved by implementing a better IP geolocation optimization model [18], we leave this for future work. To discard inaccurate results in the indirect scheme, we performed a sanity check to select only paths satisfying 0.9 ≤ RT T /(P f + P r ) ≤ 2.5, where P f and P r are the forward and reverse propagation delay as estimated by geolocation-based service.…”

Method for IP geolocation based on Path Similarity

“…In addition, TBG [10] improves on these earlier techniques by leveraging network topology, along with measurements of network delay, to constrain host position. The paper [11] introduce a detailed path-latency model to be able to determine the overall propagation delays along the network paths more accurately.…”