Spring-based geolocation

Given an IP address, it is a challenging task to obtain its geographic location. Besides approaches which associate coordinates with IP addresses in a predominantly static way, there are also measurement based approaches that exploit the correlation between the propagation delay of signals and round trip times of probe packets. We analyze multiple approaches solely based on delay measurements, i. e. without the use of third-party knowledge, and obtain mean errors of just under 100 km. In this paper, we propose a new model for IP geolocation which combines the strengths of different previous techniques and reduces IP geolocation to the problem of finding equilibrium points in a spring system. Our approach, called Spring-Based Geolocation (SBG), is able to reduce the mean error to less than 75km in our experiments without adding significant complexity. In fact, our model allows for additional data sources in a natural way, which has the potential to further improve results.