A model based approach for improving router geolocation
This study outlines two novel techniques which can be used in the area of IP geolocation. First we introduce a detailed path-latency model to be able to determine the overall propagation delays along the network paths more accurately. The knowledge of accurate propagation delay values then leads to more precise geographic distance estimation between hosts and measurement nodes. Besides these distance values the evaluation process also takes into account the discovered topology between the measurement points, and end-to-end latency measurements as well. In addition to the application of the detailed path-latency model, we describe a method which utilizes high-precision one-way delay measurements to further increase the accuracy of router geolocation techniques. The precise one-way delay values are used as a ''path-constraint'' to limit the overall geographic distance between the measurement nodes. This approach can be used to localize all the network routers along the network path between the measurement nodes, but cannot be applied to end-host localization. The techniques introduced in this paper are validated in wide range of experiments performed in the ETOMIC measurement infrastructure and in PlanetLab.