Towards Street-Level Client-Independent IP Geolocation

A highly accurate client-independent geolocation service stands to be an important goal for the Internet. Despite an extensive research effort and significant advances in this area, this goal has not yet been met. Motivated by the fact that the best results to date are achieved by utilizing additional ‘hints’ beyond inherently inaccurate delay-based measurements, we propose a novel geolocation method that fundamentally escalates the use of external information. In particular, many entities (e.g., businesses, universities, institutions) host their Web services locally and provide their actual geographical location on their Web-sites. We demonstrate that the information provided in this way, when combined with network measurements, represents a precious geolocation resource. Our methodology automatically extracts, verifies, utilizes, and opportunistically inflates such Web-based information to achieve high accuracy. Moreover, it overcomes many of the fundamental inaccuracies encountered in the use of absolute delay measurements. We demonstrate that our system can geolocate IP addresses 50 times more accurately than the best previous system, i.e., it achieves a median error distance of 690 meters on the corresponding data set.