A geolocation databases study

Yuval Shavitt*, Noa Zilberman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

130 Scopus citations

Abstract

The geographical location of Internet IP addresses is important for academic research, commercial and homeland security applications. Thus, both commercial and academic databases and tools are available for mapping IP addresses to geographic locations. Evaluating the accuracy of these mapping services is complex since obtaining diverse large scale ground truth is very hard. In this work we evaluate mapping services using an algorithm that groups IP addresses to PoPs, based on structure and delay. This way we are able to group close to 100,000 IP addresses world wide into groups that are known to share a geo-location with high confidence. We provide insight into the strength and weaknesses of IP geolocation databases, and discuss their accuracy and encountered anomalies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6081357
Pages (from-to)2044-2056
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Volume29
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2011

Funding

FundersFunder number
European Commission
Israel Science Foundation1685/07

    Keywords

    • Geographic information systems
    • Internet topology
    • Web and internet services

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