Ben Du, Massimo Candela, Bradley Huffaker, Alex C. Snoeren, kc claffy
Abstract
RIPE IPmap is a multi-engine geolocation platform operated by the RIPE NCC. One of its engines, single-radius, uses active geolocation to infer the geographic coordinates of target IP addresses. In this paper, we first introduce the methodology of IPmap’s single-radius engine, then we evaluate its accuracy, coverage, and consistency, and compare its results with commercial geolocation databases. We found that 80.3% of single-radius results have city-level accuracy for our ground truth dataset, and 87.0% have city-level consistency when geolocating different interfaces on the same routers. Single radius provided geolocation inferences for 78.5% of 26,559 core infrastructure IP addresses from our coverage evaluation dataset. The main contributions of this paper are to introduce and evaluate the IPmap single-radius engine.