IP Geolocation in Metropolitan Area Networks

Existing techniques can geolocate an IP address to a metropolitan area. Through simulation, we evaluate the performance of these existing techniques within a metropolitan area network. We identify differences between metropolitan area networks and the wide area network. We describe and evaluate new techniques which are designed specifically for use on metropolitan area networks. We present Hop-Based Geolocation, a geolocation technique that is effective under certain network topologies when ping latencies are dominated by processing delay rather than propagation delay. We show that geolocation techniques based only on ping latencies and traceroute paths are not yet precise enough for their intended applications.