No-Jump-into-Latency in China's Internet! Toward Last-Mile Hop Count Based IP Geo-localization

Last-mile geo-localization plays an essential role in many location-based services, such as fraud detection and targeted advertising. In this study, we point out that round trip time (RTT) latency shows an extremely weak correlation with physical distance estimation in China's Internet, since a path between a vantage point and a destination can often be circuitous and inflated by queuing and processing delays. To sidestep the latency measurement, we perform a three-tier hop count based IP geo-localization mapping for China's Internet, on the assumption that each provincial router only serves a limited area. The mapping approach begins at the first tier using a single vantage point to fetch large-scale traceroute paths from the server to landmarks and target IPs. At the second tier, we try to find the last common routers along the traceroute paths of targets and landmarks and aggregate their hop count distances. At the third tier, we estimate the physical distances from hop count distances and provincial router radii, and geo-localize the targets to the nearest landmarks. Through large-scale experiments, we show that our approach is both cost-efficient and reliable, and can achieve last-ten-kilometer IP geo-localization for approximately 65% of the total 48874 pingable target IP addresses with a single ping server, and our hop count based approach completely outperforms the RTT based method.