On distributed geolocation by employing spring-mass systems

Recently finding the geographic whereabouts of nodes became a key service for many distributed applications, e.g., online games or localizing delivered content. However, an exact localization may be impossible because of GPS signals being unavailable, receivers too expensive, or energy too scarce. Hence, alternatives emerged that typically rely on central databases, which in turn are often found to be inaccurate, though. Facing that problem, we study a complementary idea: By constructing a delay-weighted spring-mass embedding of nodes and augmenting the system with geographic hints, e.g., those of traditional location databases, we efficiently estimate geographic positions of nodes by multilateration and solely distributed means. We will show that peer positions can be estimated with an accuracy of a few hundred kilometers in the average case. The proposed system is evaluated by simulations that are based on real-world PlanetLab latency data.