Spring-based Geolocation

Given an IP address, it is easy to locate a node logically, i.e. finding routes to it, or to resolve its affiliation to larger entities. However, it is a challenging task to obtain the actual geographic location. This problem is known as IP geolocation. Besides approaches which associate coordinates with IP addresses in a predominantly static way, there are also measurement based approaches that exploit the correlation between the propagation delay of signals and round trip times of probe packets. We analyzed multiple approaches solely based on delay measurements, i.e. without the use of third-party knowledge, and obtained mean errors of just under 100km. In this paper, we propose a new model for IP geolocation which combines the strengths of different previous techniques and reduces IP geolocation to the problem of finding equilibrium points in a spring system. Our approach, called Spring-Based Geolocation (SBG), is able to reduce the mean error to less than 75km for our data set without adding significant complexity.     «

Given an IP address, it is easy to locate a node logically, i.e. finding routes to it, or to resolve its affiliation to larger entities. However, it is a challenging task to obtain the actual geographic location. This problem is known as IP geolocation. Besides approaches which associate coordinates with IP addresses in a predominantly static way, there are also measurement based approaches that exploit the correlation between the propagation delay of signals and round trip times of probe packet...     »