Towards Geolocation of Millions of IP Addresses

Hu, Zi and Heidemann, John and Pradkin, Yuri
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Zi Hu, John Heidemann and Yuri Pradkin 2012. Towards Geolocation of Millions of IP Addresses. Technical Report ISI-TR-2012-680. USC/Information Sciences Institute. [PDF]

abstract

Previous measurement-based IP geolocation algorithms have focused on accuracy, studying a few targets with increasingly sophisticated algorithms taking measurements from tens of vantage points (VPs). In this paper, we study how to scale up existing measurement-based geolocation algorithms like Shortest Ping and CBG to cover the whole Internet. We show that with many vantage points, VP proximity to the target is the most important factor affecting accuracy. This observation suggests our new algorithm that selects the best few VPs for each target from many candidates. This approach addresses the main bottleneck to geolocation scalability: minimizing traffic into each target (and also out of each VP) while maintaining accuracy. Using this approach we have currently geolocated about 24% of the allocated, unicast, IPv4 address-space (about 55% of the addresses in the Internet that can be directly geolocated).

reference

@techreport{Hu12b,
  author = {Hu, Zi and Heidemann, John and Pradkin, Yuri},
  title = {Towards Geolocation of Millions of IP Addresses},
  institution = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  year = {2012},
  sortdate = {2012-01-01},
  project = {ant, amite},
  jsubject = {chronological},
  number = {ISI-TR-2012-680},
  month = may,
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {geolocation, IPv4 address space},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Hu12b.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Hu12b.pdf},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {authors}
}