IP City-level Geolocation Based on the PoP-level Network Topology Analysis

In view of that the reliability of existing typical IP city-level geolocation approaches are limited to the delay measurement accuracy, IP targets reachability and other factors, this paper proposed an IP city-level geolocation approach based on the PoP-level (Point of Presence) network analysis. First, the "low-high-low" distribution characteristics of the one-hop-delay among network nodes in different cities are revealed. The network connections in the IP targets' cities are obtained by partitioning the probe paths based on one-hop-delay. Secondly, the PoP-level network in these cities are analyzed by extracting closely connected network nodes, and PoP city-level location are determined by landmarks contained. Finally, the core routers in these PoPs are selected as the city core routers and used to achieve IP targets city-level geolocation. The experimental results on 4980 IP targets in Henan province of China show that: the average accuracy of the proposed approach is 97.2%, which is much higher than that of the existing typical city-level geolocation approaches based on IP databases or delay measurement. At the same time, some of the IP targets which are not reachable can also achieve a reliable city-level geolocation by this approach.