Whois Based Geolocation: A Strategy to Geolocate Internet Hosts

There are several strategies in the literature to geolocate Internet hosts, however the accuracy of their estimates is a common issue. Furthermore, accurate Internet host location remains a challenge due to incomplete domain registers. In this paper, we propose a classification for geolocation strategies and present the Whois Based Geolocation (WBG) approach, a strategy developed to geolocate Internet hosts given their IP address information. This new mechanism is based on different strategies combination and uses a heuristic to improve the results. An analysis that considers both accuracy and completeness is made showing the effectiveness of our tool.