Assessing the Geographic Resolution of Exhaustive Tabulation for Geolocating Internet Hosts

Abstract

Geolocation of Internet hosts relies mainly on exhaustive tabulation techniques. Those techniques consist in building a database, that keeps the mapping between IP blocks and a geographic location. Relying on a single location for a whole IP block requires using a coarse enough geographic resolution. As this geographic resolution is not made explicit in databases, we try in this paper to better understand it by comparing the location estimates of databases with a well-established active measurements-based geolocation technique.We show that the geographic resolution of geolocation databases is far coarser than the resolution provided by active measurements for individual IP addresses. Given the lack of information in databases about the expected location error within each IP block, one cannot have much confidence in the accuracy of their location estimates. Geolocation databases should either provide information about the expected accuracy of the location estimates within each block, or reveal information about how their location estimates have been built, unless databases have to be trusted blindly.