Title: Accurate geolocation using network coordinates

Authors: Jiyoung Shin; Eric Chan-Tin; Praveenkumar Khethavath

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA ' Department of Computer Science, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA ' Department of Mathematics, Engineering and Computer Science, LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, NY 11101, USA

Abstract: Geolocation is an important factor in everyday life and used in location-based services, such as weather alerts and navigation. The most straightforward method is for the user to report its own location. However, this is not always possible. Attempts to geolocate users based on IP addresses and network measurements have resulted in fairly accurate geolocation, with low error. We show that newer network coordinate systems can provide even better accuracy in geolocating users. Compared to ping or older network coordinate systems, these new systems produce a much lower error in estimating the actual physical distance between a pair of IP addresses. The median error for direct network measurement is 4.2%, while the median error for Treeple is 1.0%. Our results for Treeple show a median localisation accuracy of 12.40 miles, more accurate compared to leading geolocation methods such as Octant.

Keywords: network coordinate systems; user geolocation; physical distance; estimation; network measurement; performance evaluation; security; IP addresses; localisation accuracy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2015.071830

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2015 Vol.10 No.3, pp.170 - 182

Received: 06 Nov 2014
Accepted: 17 Feb 2015
Published online: 19 Sep 2015 *

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