Revisiting Constraint Based Geo Location: Improving
Accuracy through Removal of Outliers
Sameer Qazi and
Muhammad Kadri
College
of Engineering, Karachi
Institute of Economics and Technology, Pakistan
Abstract: IP
based GeoLocation has become increasingly important for network administrators
for a number of reasons. The first and foremost is to determine cyber
attackers’ geographical location to prevent, contain and thwart further attacks.
A secondary reason may be to target potential advertisements to users based on
their geographical location. IP addresses are indicators of the users location
at a course level such as country or city. For further refined estimate of user
location within a city, for example, network measurements as simple as simple
round trip time of pings to the user can give a more precise estimate of users
location. Recently, several researchers have proposed constraint based
optimization approaches to estimate a users location using a set of landmark
hosts using multi-lateration. In this work, we show that the optimization of
such schemes are sometimes plagued by outliers which causes location estimated
to be deteriorated greatly. We provide anecdotal evidence for this and
proposals to alleviate these problems for detection, masking or removal of
these outlier measurements and show that location error improvement of several
hundreds or thousands of km are possible.
Keywords: Geo
location of internet hosts, constraint-based optimization, location error.
Received November 17, 2014; accepted March 23, 2015
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