Two-Tier Geographic Location of Internet Hosts

Multimedia delivery systems, such as Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), improve by knowing the geographic location of their clients. Therefore, we focus on a measurement-based geographic location service of Internet hosts. Such a service infers host locations from delay measurements taken from probe machines toward landmarks, which are hosts with a known geographic location, and the host to be located. We aim at mitigating the number of measurements generated in the network. We propose a two-tier hierarchical structure of landmarks to geographically locate an Internet host as opposed to a flat structure. In our two-tier structure, the upper level mitigates long distance measurements and the lower level keeps measurements within restricted areas. As a consequence, the two-tier geographic location structure significantly reduces the number of measurements and thereby it favors scalability.