PLAG: Practical Landmark Allocation for Cloud Geolocation

Knowing the physical location of files in a cloud system is of a great importance for any user, as is it can affect the whole service drastically. However, pinpointing the exact coordinates for the location of a server is very challenging. Providers prefer not to share the location of their data centers with public for security reasons, and this fact also adds to the complexity of this concept. Researchers have recently developed delay based schemes for cloud data geolocation, some of which use proprietary landmarks for location verification. Unfortunately, such landmark-based schemes are often impractical due to high cost and latency. In this paper, we have developed a practical scheme for landmark allocation in cloud data geolocation. We augment existing approaches with a new landmark allocation modification to get the same or often better accuracy, while decreasing the cost considerably. Our approach improves the existing state of the art by introducing the concept of publicly distributed landmarks for all delay based geolocation techniques.