Geolocation of IP Hosts in Large Computer Networks with Congestion

This paper presents geolocation of Internet Protocol (IP) hosts in large computer networks with congestion, using round trip time (RTT) of ping packets. Most current approaches consider RTT to be composed only of propagation delay. However, in practice, queuing delay forms a significant component of RTT, and hence, current RTT measurement based approaches result in large errors in estimation of the geolocation. This paper proposes two geolocation algorithms: LOGTHRESH and ASHYP that consider queuing delay due to network congestion, in addition to propagation delay of the RTT. The proposed algorithms are shown to reduce the error in geo-location to as low as 0.7% in some scenarios. When some existing enhancement mechanisms like semi-definite programming available in the literature was used on top of our proposed approach, median estimation errors as low as 0.3 % can be achieved.