Leveraging Buffering Delay Estimation for Geolocation of Internet Hosts

Geolocation techniques aim at determining the geographic location of an Internet host based on its IP address. Currently, measurement-based geolocation techniques disregard the buffering delays that may be introduced at each hop along the path taken by probe packets. To fill this gap, we propose the GeoBuD (Geolocation using Buffering Delay estimation) approach. Although the network delay and the geographic distance between two Internet hosts have been shown to be related to some extent, leveraging buffering delay estimation at each hop for geolocation purposes is challenging for two reasons. First, correctly estimating the buffering delay at intermediate hops along a traceroute path for geolocation purposes depends on the accurate estimation of the geolocation of the intermediate routers. Second, even given an a priori knowledge of the location of the routers, estimating the buffering delays is difficult due to the coarse-grained information provided by delay measurements. Relying on traceroute measurements, we show that leveraging buffering delay estimation improves accuracy in the measurement-based geolocation of Internet hosts as well as the confidence that the geolocation service associates to each estimation.