Posit

Abstract

Location-specific Internet services are predicated on the ability to identify the geographic position of IP hosts accurately. Fundamental to current state-of-the-art geolocation techniques is reliance on heavyweight traceroute-like probes that put a significant traffic load on networks. In this paper, we introduce a new lightweight approach to IP geolocation that we call Posit. This methodology requires only a small number of delay measurements conducted to end host targets in conjunction with a computationally-efficient statistical embedding technique. We demonstrate that Posit performs better than all existing geolocation tools across a wide spectrum of measurement infrastructures with varying geographic densities. Specifically, Posit is shown to geolocate hosts with median error improvements of over 55% with respect to all current measurement-based IP geolocation methodologies.