Improving IP-based geo-location through Internet Topology and Geospatial Datasets

Abstract

<p>Accurate IP geo-location is crucial to the effectiveness of a wide array of Internet-based services ranging from targeted advertising and website localization to content delivery, security logging and authentication. The most widely used technique for remote IP geo-location is to passively query a pre-built database mapping IP blocks to physical locations. Recent analysis of commercially available databases has revealed limited global coverage and limited accuracy below the country level.</p><p>In this work, we first present a new form of geo-location technique which cross-references Regional Internet Registry (RIR) entries with topology information derived from Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing data. Second, we present a Hadoop integrated PATRICIA tree designed to store this dataset. Finally, we present a system for accurately and efficiently mapping location strings to representative alpha-shape polygons.</p><p>Our experiments show that cross-referencing RIR entries with topology information allows for improvements in location accuracy below the country level in comparison with traditional databases. Furthermore, we show that use of a PATRICIA tree provides maximum storage efficiency with minimal performance impact. Finally, we show that representing locations as alpha shapes provides a high level of accuracy with minimal performance overhead.</p>