Improving the Accuracy of IP Geolocation Based on Public IP Geoservices Data

Abstract

IP geolocation is the process of determining the real geographic location of an electronic device connected to the Internet, by its global network address [1]. Currently, it has found wide application in Internet commerce, marketing and advertising, information security [2], and other areas of human activity. There are different methods for determining the location of a remote network device, which differ both in type of analyzed information (delay packet transmission, resource records DNS-servers, the content of Web pages), and the result (country or city name, mail address, probable area of location or exact coordinates) [3, 4]. IP geolocating error depends on the country, population density, type of network device and ranges from several tens of meters to hundreds of kilometers. For the same input data, the results of different IP-geoservices can vary significantly. The object of this study is the public IP-geoservices that provide geolocating services for nodes in the global network based on their IP addresses, and specifically, their accuracy and completeness. The sample of IP-geoservices for testing was formed from the most popular ones [5]. During the study, the results of IP-geolocation were compared with reliable information about the location of some IP addresses, as indicators of accuracy country, city and geographic coordinates were used. Based on the comparative analysis of the test results, conclusions about the accuracy of IP-geolocation services according to the selected indicators, their essential properties, as well as the dependence of geolocation error on the size of the settlement were made. To improve the accuracy of IP georeferencing, the authors proposed an ensemble method for averaging coordinates obtained from several IP geoservices.