IP Geolocation with a Crowd-sourcing Broadband Performance Tool

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an IP geolocation DB creation method based on a crowd-sourcing Internet broadband performance measurement tagged with locations and present an IP geolocation DB based on 7 years of Internet broadband performance data in Korea. Compared with other commercial IP geolocation DBs, our crowd-sourcing IP geolocation DB shows increased accuracy with fine-grained granularity. We confirm that the low accuracy of commercial IP geolocation DBs mainly results from selecting a single representative location for a large IP block from the Whois registry DB, parsing city names in a naive way, and resolving the wrong geolocation coordinates. We also found that the geographic location of IP blocks has continuously changed but has been stable. Although our IP geolocation DB is limited to Korea, the 32 million broadband performance test records over 7 years provide wide coverage as well as fine-grained accuracy.